vol2-no3

Volume Two � SPRING, 1960 .� Number Three

Jacob Scher: Some Comments oti the Law 0/ Obscenity

David I. Rubin: The Prophet

Donald T. Torchiana: Heart's Needle: Snodgrass Strides Through the Universe

William De Witt Snodgrass: Letter

C. Dennis Wunsch: End 0/ the Rainbow

Richard John Smith: The Valley 0/ a Thousand Hills

Shakespeare's Coriolanus, a Symposium 0/ Seveil,

Carl A. Roebuck: Coriolanus: The Story

Stuart G. P. Small: Plutarch's Life of Coriolanus

Lacy B. Smith: Coriolanus and the State

Richard C. Snyder: Coriolanus: A Political View

Frank W. Fetter: What Does Coriolanus Tell the Economist?

Robert I. Watson: Coriolanus: An Exercise in Psychoanalysis

Moody E. Prior: Coriolanus as a Tragic Hero

Barbara J. Fox: The Sum

Harold M. Grutzmacher: Poems

Northwestern University

TRI-QUARTERLY

The Tri-QUARTERLY is a magazine devoted to fiction, poetry, and articles of general interest, published in the fall, winter, and spring quarters at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, and printed by Lloyd Hollister Inc., Wilmette, Illinois. Subscription rates: $1.50 yearly within the United States; $1.65, Canada; $1.75, foreign. Single copies will be sold locally for $.50. Contributions, correspondence, and subscriptions should be addressed to The Tri-QUARTERLY, care of the Northwestern University Press, 1840 Sheridan Road, Evanston, Illinois. Contributions unaccompanied by a selfaddressed envelope and return postage will not be returned. Except by invitation, contributors are' limited to persons who have some connection with the University. Copyright, 1960, by Northwestern University. All rights reserved.

Editorial Board

The editor is EDWARD B. HUNGERFORD. Senior members of the editorial board are Professors RAY A. BILLINGTON and MELVILLE HERSKOVITS of the College of Liberal Arts, Dean JAMES H. MC BURNEY of the School of Speech, Dr. WILLIAM B. WARTMAN of the School of Medicine, and Mr. JAMES M. BARKER of the Board of Trustees.

Undergraduate

editors,

ROBERT N. HYLAND, DWAYNE THORPE, MARK SMITH, DAVID RUBIN.

Undergraduate Staff, DONALD W. HAUGER, circulation manager, JULIA COTTRELL, publicity manager.

The Tri-QUARTERLY is distributed by Northwestern University Press, and is under the business management of the Press.

Jacob Scher

Jacob Scher, professor of Journalism at Northwestern University, was educated in the Chicago public schools and graduated in law from the University of Illinois. He was admitted to the Illinois and Federal bars in 1931 and practiced law in Chicago for five years. He was Chicago supervisor of the Federal Writers Project (WPA) during several of the depression years. Then he went into newspaper work: for the United Press, Chicago American, Chicago SunTimes, Oakland (California) Tribune, and Chicago Tribune. He joined the Northwestern faculty in 1947.

At present he is chief counsel of the Government Information Subcommittee, U.S. House of Representatives, in Washington, D.C., on leave from the University.

SOME COMMENTS ON THE LAW OF OBSCENITY

THELAW OF OBSCENITY tries to' codify the limit of permissible conduct in the portrayal of nudity and sex. Some argue that this is impossible, that the obscenity laws represent the eternal "discrepancy between law and fact," as Thorstein Veblen put it. You can't codify human nature. they say. Natural man is always in conflict with social order; Freud recognized this when he spoke of the super-ego which censors and suppresses the "natural" in man.

D. H. Lawrence tried to raise "natural" sex life to the level of religious sacrament. His great paean to sex is Lady Chatterley's Lover. In a famous essay trying to distinguish obscenity from pornography, Lawrence said that pornography ought to be censored, and he explained how it can be recognized:

In the first place, genuine pornography is almost always underworld; it doesn't come into the open. In the second, you can recognize it by the insult it offers, invariably, to sex, and to the human spirit. Pornograp,)iy is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it. Thtlt is unpardonable. The insult to the human body, the insult to a vital human relationship! Sex is a very powerful, beneficial and neces-

*Mr. Scher's article is printed here without the extensive documentation with which it was prepared. The author will be glad to provide citations and bibliographical information to interested persons.

Spring, 1960

sary stimulus in htIDtan life, and we are all grateful when we feel its warm, natural flow through us, like a form of sunshine.

On the other hand it is intellectually fashionable to take a libertarian stand on freedom of speech and press. It also is fashionable to be tolerant about sex in art and literature. But the moral anarchist is just as bad as the censor. For example, the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley was launched with the ballyhoo of an atomic submarine. It had a prefatory note by Archibald MacLeish and a scholarly introduction by Mark Schorer. This was to give the book the imprimatur of a great work of art. The artistic message was to show the fulfillment of self through love thwarted by social convention. This being the purpose and intention of the author, is it valid to ask whether the purpose was fulfilled? May one ask whether the thousands of persons who gobbled up the book from railroad and drugstore stands found in it what Lawrence, MacLeish, and Schorer said was there-or did they read it for the clinical descriptions of sex? Did they come away from the book with Lawrence's insight into the problems of social mobility in the class-structured society in Britain? Did they develop a new wisdom about the emotional needs of fully matured human beings?

As for the "truth to life" plea-that the writer

has a duty to tell all, that he must be true to life--how many "emancipated" persons, genuinely in love in the Lawrence sense, ever have written a letter to match the vulgarity of the one which closes the book? How many men ever have addressed their mates-legal or casual-in the Anglo-Saxon terms the gamekeeper uses in telling Lady Chatterley what real love is like?

To ask these questons is to refuse to be badgered by the avant-garde into admitting that since sex is life and life is art, therefore sex is art. Given the fact that sex is a basic and valid form of human experience, how much of this impulse is used to distort human needs and values through advertising? How much of mass communications is hooked to the sadismmasochism complex, let alone straight lewdness, in order to be marketable? Dr. Frederick Wertham in The Seduction of the Innocents describes the effect of violence and horrors in comic books read by children. Justice Felix Frankfurter calls this sordid exploitation of man's natural impulses not only dirt for dirt's sake but "dirt for money's sake." What is the point where harm begins and where social restraints are needed? What are the proper boundaries to freedom of expression as guaranteed by the First Amendment?

II

The United States Supreme Court has been wrestling with the problem for some years now, and the difficulties we as individuals might have in delimiting the areas of freedom and control are matched by the diversity of opinions expressed by the Supreme Court [ustices. Almost every decision has separate concurring and various dissenting opinions. These court splits are indicative of their own humanity in this difficult area.

Let us look at a recent Supreme Court decision, Kingsley Pictures v. Regents (1959), involving the movie, Lady Chatterley's Lover. A license to show the movie had been denied by the New York Board of Regents, granted such power by state law. The Supreme Court reversed the finding that the movie "alluringly portrays adultery as proper behavior" and held it could be shown. The court ruled that such suppression violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments because it interfered with the right to advocate ideas, even unpopular ideas.

Justice Potter Stewart wrote the majority opinion: Though the movie portrays and even advocates conduct contrary to legal and moral

standards, it is protected by the First Amendment; it may advocate adultery as much as it may advocate socialism or the single tax. Speech or press may be curbed only if they advocate or incite to illegal conduct. Movies are under the federal protection of the First Amendment, and they are under state protection through the Fourteenth Amendment, for the "liberty" provision of the due process clause incorporates the First Amendment.

But there were five concurring opinions, of which The WaH Street Journal commented editorially, "Supreme Court opinion that leaves the law in such a disarray must spread woe among those who must later come before the bar." All the other justices agreed that the movie ought to be shown, but with widely differing opinionsand each had to explain his stand because it was different from that of Justice Stewart.

Harlan, with Frankfurter and Whittaker concurring, said: (1) Stewart went too far in holding the New York statute unconstitutional. The statute meets the requirement of setting up a definition of "obscenity" which is definite enough for predictability and enforcement. The statute says obscenity shall be that material whose "dominant effect is ertftic or pornographic, or which portrays acts of sexual immorality, perversion or lewdness as proper patterns of conduct." This definition, Harlan argued, is sufficient to make the statute valid, for it did not intend to make punishable the advocacy of adultery. (2) The movie, far from any advocacy at all, merely portrays a pathetic love triangle but contains nothing remotely inciting to the commission of adultery. (3) Rather than by sweeping definitions or generalizations in this area, the process of constitutional judgment makes the Supreme Court a final board of censors, whether it likes it or not. "The court cannot hope ultimately to spare itself the necessity for individualized adjudications," he said.

Black, concurring, took issue with this last point: he objected to judicial censorship. The justices of the Supreme Court are "especially unsuited to make the kind of value judgments as to whether movies are good or bad for the local communities." If every judge has to view the movie and make a subjective judgment, then the statute is meaningless for lack of predictability as to when it might be violated, because who can tell what the judge might decide?

Frankfurter concurred but replied to Black on the problem of judicial censorship. "As one whose taste in art and literature hardly qualified him for

the avant-garde, I am more than surprised, after viewing the picture, that the New York authorities should have banned Lady Ch.atterley's Lover." He found that the movie was not "pornography" in the sense of Lawrence's essay, quoting the writer's statement that "pornography is the attempt to insult sex." It is the duty of the judge to make such determinations "instance by instance and case by case." Due process does not permit the establishment of a definition of obscenity which would turn into a Procrustean bed.

Douglas, with Black concurring, said that any licensing of movies is a form of prior restraint or censorship prohibited by Near v. Minnesota in 1931. In New York the movie exhibitor must make application for a license. If he is turned down he may appeal to the state Board of Regents, which again can turn him down. Then he must go' to the courts. Since movies are protected by the First Amendment, such prior restraint is wrong. If it is permitted for movies, what is to prohibit a statute making the publication of newspapers subject to licensing? Both are First Amendment activities. The only legal way is by a proper arrest and prosecution for every violation of the state obscenity law, with a judicial determination and the right to a trial by jury.

Clark, concurring, said the decision should have made clear the difference between advocating and depicting. Had the movie depicted acts of lewdness and immorality, the refusal of a license would have been proper; since it merely advocated, the statute was not violated and the refusal to grant the license to the exhibitor was wrong.

Here indeed is a chewed-over carcass: even the bare bones left, after an attempt to reconcile the various views, give us little view of the skeleton. Precisely what is obscenity and how may the courts determine a violation.?

III

The term "obscenity," from the Latin obscenus for evil-looking or filthy, had its origin in the common law and came to be defined as material "offensive to modesty or decency or expressing or suggesting unchaste or lustful ideas, or being impure, indecent or lewd." Motive or intention was immaterial; the test was solely whether the matter tended to deprave or corrupt persons likely to be susceptible to immoral influences.

But the prosecution for the misdemeanor of obscenity was found insufficient in Victorian England: in 1857 Lord Campbell's Act was passed

Spring, 1960

by Parliament. It gave magistrates power to grant warrants to police to search suspected premises and seize and destroy such material when evidence of a sale or possession was presented. Lord Campbell said: "The measure was intended to apply exclusively to works written for the single purpose of corrupting the morals of youth and of a nature calculated to shock the common feelings of decency in a well-regulated mind."

The following year the famous case of Regina v. Hicklin was tried. A militant Protestant society had published The Confessional unmasked: showing the Depravity of the Roman priesthood, the iniquity of the Confessional, and the Questions put to Females in Confessions. Sir Alexander Cockburn, C.J., affirmed the seizure and destruction of 22 volumes and said: "The test of obscenity is whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.

The emphasis of the Hicklin test was a "tendency to deprave and corrupt." It meant variously a tendency to (1) arouse impure thoughts, (2) encourage a person to impure conduct, or (3) endanger the prevailing public morals. It was a "dangerous tendency" doctrine, with no proof admitted of either the intention of the author or of the possible effect on the audience.

The test of intention or motive of the writer was raised ten years later in the Bradlaugh case. Although it was specifically rejected by the judge, again Sir Alexander, it was applied by the jury. Mrs. Annie Besant, the noted theosophist, and Charles Bradlaugh were prosecuted for publishing a pamphlet advocating birth control. Up to this time, prosecution had been for pornographic language or depiction, but not for general theme. The Chief Justice was openly sympathetic to the defense, but he felt it his duty under the law to find them guilty if the work tended "to vitiate or corrupt the morals of youths and others, and to bring them into a state of wickedness, lewd�ess and debauchery." The jury found the book "calculated to corrupt public morals, but we entirely exonerate the defendants from any corrupt motives." The Chief Justice insisted this was a verdict of guilty, but he was ready to discharge them. However, Mrs. Besant had made some scathing references to the proceed. ing, though not about the judge, at a public meeting during the trial, and the judge held them in contempt of court. Later, in a rather muddy appeal, the finding of guilty was overturned.

IV

The Hicklin "dangerous tendency" rule was followed in the United States: it was the formula used in customs cases under the laws of 1842 and 1857 and by the post office by laws of 1865 and 1873. Neither the test of intention of the author nor the total effect of the book was applied in 1930 when An Amencan Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser was held objectionable in Massachusetts. An isolated passage taken out of context was enough to determine obscenity. The court said: "Even assuming great literary excellence, artistic worth and an impelling moral lesson, there is nothing essential to the history of the life of its principal character that would be lost if those passages were omitted.

This was the situation in 1933 when U.S. District Judge John M. Woolsey was called upon to decide the right of customs officials to seize Ulysses by James Joyce. He asked himself a number of ,questions far beyond the tests laid down in the Hicklin case:

Was the intent of the author to exploit sensuality or obscenity? No, he said. "I detect nowhere the leer of the sensualist."

Was this a sincere work of art? Yes, the author was writing an experimental work trying to probe into human minds and motives. In doing so he used "words as would be naturally and habitually used, I believe, by the type of folk" depicted. "It must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season spring."

Did the book as a whole tend to stir up sex impulses or lead to sexually impure or lustful thoughts in a mature and prudent person? No, for such a person would read the book as a whole, not in isolated passages; so the book could not be considered prurient.

Judge Augustus Hand of the Federal Court of Appeals upheld the decision of Judge Woolsey and established four aspects of the test for obscenity: (1) the purpose of the author, (2) the dominant effect rather than isolated passages, (3) the possible effect, not on a child or psychopath, but on a normal mature person, and (4) the judgment of literary critics as to its artistic merits.

On these grounds, a number of decisions followed. The banning of E squire magazine from the mails by the postmaster general was overturned in 1942 by the Supreme Court, because the postmaster was not given the right by statute to choose between good and bad literature; otherwise he would become a censor and could regulate public taste. In 1948 the Supreme Court

overturned the conviction of a New York bookseller under a state obscenity law because the law failed to define "obscene literature" and therefore was so vague and indefinite it was incapable of enforcement on a uniform basis. The same defect of vagueness was found by the Supreme Court in 1952 when the exhibition of a movie was banned on the grounds that it violated the New York prohibition against "sacrilegious" movies. The court took jurisdiction of the case by holding that movies are protected by the First Amendment through the liberty provision of the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Movies were put in the same position on freedom of speech and press as books, pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers.

Still the test for obscenity remained difficult, because all statutory language is necessarily vague: legal language cannot be as scientifically precise as a mathematical formula. State courts have differed in their treatment of the same books. For example, Edmund Wilson's Memoirs of Hecate County was held obscene in New York but not in California. God's Little Acre by Erskine Caldwell was found obscene in Massachusetts but not in New York and Pennsylvania.

When the conviction on Wilson's Memoirs of Hecate County was held obscene in New York Supreme Court, the court split four to four, and Justice Jackson objected to the whole proceeding on the vague charge of obscenity saying, "If the court decided constitutional issues on the merits of literary works, it would become the High Court of Obscenity.

VHow, then, can the court avoid becoming "the High Court of Obscenity"? One line of reasoning holds this can be done by setting standards for obscenity which can be applied equally and universally on a clearly enunciated set of tests. The problem is not different from those of sedition or contempt of court, where Justice Holmes formulated "the clear and present danger" doctrine. The obscenity cases fall into the very trap of dangerous tendency, which amounts to thought control. In contempt, the acts punished are those which present a clear and present danger to the administration of justice. In sedition, it is the incitement to an overt illegal act which is the clear and present danger that goes beyond the protected areas of freedom of speech and press. The same test ought to be applied to obscenity, the argument goes.

The "clear and present" danger doctrine was

NORTHWESTERN TRI-QUARTERLY

used in an obscenity case by a Pennsylvania judge in 1950. At issue were charges of obscenity against a number of widely read books: Sanctuary. and The Wild Palms by William Faulkner; the Studs Lonigan trilogy and A World I Never Made by James T. Farrell; and God's Little Acre by Erskine Caldwell. The statute defined obscenity as material "sexually impure and pornographic." This, said Judge Curtis Bok, was meant to include "any writing whose dominant purpose and effect is erotic allurement-that is to say a calculated and effective incitement to sexual desires." The test, he said, was not whether one would permit his teen-age daughter to read the book; that is a problem for the home and not for the law. Sooner or later she must be familiarized with the biological facts of life. On choice, he said, "I should prefer my three daughters meet the facts of life in my library than behind a neighbor's barn." Specifically rejecting the rule of "dangerous tendency" doctrine in Regina v. Hicklin, the judge said the criminal law is not the custodian of people's morals; it can be applied only when "the peace and order that free men need for the shaping of their common destinies is violated."

"The causal connection between the book and criminal behavior must appear beyond a reasonable doubt," he said. The statute may be applied in exercise of police power in derogation of free speech and press "only when there is reasonable and demonstrable cause to believe that a crime or misdemeanor has been committed as the perceptible result of the publication." To him the "tendency" doctrine was not enough, because there was too much room for individual opinion and taste, even among judges; there must be proof of a proximate causal relation beween the work and criminal behavior.

The Model Penal Code in 1957 tried, in the following language, to set a standard which would prevent the need for a "High Court of Obscenity":

Obscenity is defined in terms of material which appeals predominantly to prurient interests in sexual matters and which goes beyond customary freedom of expression in these matters. We reject the prevailing tests of tendency to arouse lustful thoughts or desires, because it is unrealistically broad for a society that plainly tolerates a great degree of erotic interest in literature, advertising and art, and because regulation of thought or desire unconnected with overt misbehavior raises the most acute constitutional as well as practical difficulties.

VI

This test was applied in 1958 by Justice Brennan in Roth v. U. S. in which two cases were con-

Spring, 1960

solidated, one under federal the other under state statute. This was Brennan's test: "Whether to the average person, applying contemporary commuity standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whoZe appeals to prurient interest The Hicklin test, judging obscenity by the effect of isolated passages upon the susceptible person, might well encompass material legitimately treating with sex, and so it must be rejected as unconstitutionally restrictive of the freedoms of speech and press."

In Roth, Brennan tried to lay down a yardstick for obscenity and thus prevent the court from becoming the "High Court of Obscenity." Policemen, prosecutors and judges could apply this test. To those who asked, Is the language of the test precise and definite enough for fair enforcement? Brennan replied: "Lack of preciseness is not itself offensive to the requirement of due process" because "the Constitution does not require impossible standards." He replied to the semantic objection by saying that all language has some degree of impreciseness. The words of the statutes and of his definition give a proper degree of warning. He continued: "Sex and obscenity are not synonymous. Obscene material deals with sex in a manner appealing to prurient interest. The portrayal of sex, e.g. in art, literature and scientific works, is not itself sufficient reason to deny material the constitutional protection of freedom of speech or press. Sex, a great and mysterious force in human life, has indisputably been a subject of absorbing interest to mankind throughout the ages." The yardstick was "the application of community standards." Such determinations usually are questions of fact for the jury, for the jury is the representative of the community; it tests in tort actions such questions as "reasonable prudence" and in criminal cases the problem of criminal intent. This was Brennan's answer.

But-as usual in obscenity cases reaching the Supreme Court in recent years-Brennan's colleagues on the bench had their own ideas. For example, Chief Justice Warren, though concurring, said he wanted to make sure that intention, or "scienter," was understood to be part of the test for obscenity. The court ought to determine, he said, whether, as in all other criminal matters, there was willful and knowing intention to appeal to prurient interests. Otherwise the definition of Brennan might be taken to be broad enough to interfere with the arts and sciences and communications in general.

Justice Harlan dissented. Brennan's test, he said, opened the door to "easy labeling" and to

jury verdicts instead of "facing up to the tough individual problems of constitutional judgment involved in every obscenity case." It is the courts who protect constitutional rights, not juries. He added: "Many juries might find Joyce's Ulysses or Boccaccio's Decameron obscene." Harlan also objected to the decision on the federal case: he wondered whether obscenity wasn't the kind of crime against which the states alone could legislate under their police power and therefore was outside the control of the federal government. "Congress has no substantial power over sexual morality," he argued.

Douglas and Black dissented: Brennan's test was a form of thought control outlawed by the First Amendment. His test for obscenity was "purity of thought," so the punishment was for "thoughts provoked, not for overt acts or antisocial conduct. This test cannot be squared with our decisions under the First Amendment." They outlined their reasoning as follows: (1) The test gives the censor free reign, because anything may arouse lustful or prurient thoughts-music, a painting, etc. (2) No proof has ever been made by sociologists or psychiatrists that reading of questionable material ever has caused delinquency or criminal conduct. (3) The test of "that which offends the common conscience of the community" is bad because in the "battle between the literati and the Philistines, the Philistines are certain to win." (4) The First Amendment has nothing to do with the moral code: that is why it is given a preferred position in the constitutional structure, and neither the courts nor the legislatures can "weigh the values of speech against silence." Concluded Douglas: "I would give the broad sweep of the First Amendment full support. I have the same confidence in the ability of our people to reject noxious literature as I have in their economics, politics, or any other field."

VII

In the same year, the Supreme Court upheld the power of a state to enact legislation giving judges the right to act against obscenity by injunction. Involved in Kingsley Books v. Broum was a New York statute, adopted because police were hampered in their fight on obscenity. If they were limited to the usual method of making an arrest for each offense, the trial and conviction of the dealer on misdemeanor charges could not stop the traffic. The sale goes on during the long wait for the trial to come up; after conviction the dealer may turn right around and continue his trade in the materials. The New York Legis-

lature provided that the chief legal or executive officer of a municipality could obtain an order for seizure of the material and a temporary injunction, after which a regular hearing would be held to determine whether the material should be suppressed and the dealer punished. Justice Frankfurter, writing the majority opinion, upheld the statute. This was not prior censorship by the city officials or the judge, he said, and therefore did not violate Near v. Minnesota; a final judicial determination was made on the question of obscenity in a court proceeding. Following his basic reasoning in many other cases, Frankfurter held that a state under its police power had the right to define crimes so long as they were not clearly unreasonable and in violation of the constitution. The Legislature here had determined that the danger from obscenity demanded this kind of action.

Warren, Douglas, and Black dissented. The Chief Justice objected that the statute put books on trial without previously stated standards of criminality. The proceeding was an equity action and not a criminal action. "It savors too much of book burning," he said.

Douglas and Black said this again was a violation of the First Amendment protection of freedom of speech and press: (1) It gives the state paralyzing power of previous censorship; and (2) obscenity should be determined case by case; this procedure in equity is like the injunction action held unconstitutional in Near v. Minnesota; it does violence to the First Amendment by setting up judicial prior restraint on publication.

The licensing of movies generally has been upheld in court decisions-despite the reservations Douglas and Black stated in the obscenity dissents. In addition Douglas, in the Murdock case (1943), upheld the rights of Jehovah's Witnesses to sell and disseminate their literature without licensing, because the business and social function of a First Amendment activity cannot be separated. Douglas and Black dissented in the Corona Independent case (1953) in which they doubted that an equal and nondiscriminatory right-to-do-business tax could be imposed on a newspaper, because it was a tax on a First Amendment activity. But the licensing of movies can take place only when basic rights are not violated, the courts have held. A typical case was that of 1954 of American Civil Liberties Union v. City of Chicago in which Justice Walter V. Schaefer of the Illinois Supreme Court held the Chicago licensing act legal.

The effect of such decisions is to give the

police censor board the power to badger the movie exhibitor and then to permit the equity court to sit as a one-man censor. They violate the basic rule that obscenity can be tested only by a legal arrest under a criminal statute and a due process court hearing. Historically, equity action is permitted only when (1) there is no adquate remedy at law, and (2) there is danger of irreparable harm. Police censor boards have been held illegal in many decisions; the police have only one legal way to enforce an obscenity lawto make an arrest and go to trial. Supreme Court decisions on movie licensing remain unclear.

VIII

Thus, some advances have been made in clarifying the limits of restrictions on freedom of the press because of obscenity. Various elements in the test for obscenity are:

The work must be judged as a whole, not by an excerpt. The prurient matter must color the work as a whole.

It must affect a normal mature person, rather than a child or a psychopath.

It must have artistic purpose rather than be dirt for dirt's sake or appeal to prurient interest.

It is proper if its main purpose is to portray a way of life realistically, a region, or historical matter.

The dominant effect must be literary or artistic or scientific rather than to arouse sexual desires.

But when all of this is said, there still is room left for the kind of differences of opinion which have split the Supreme Court in its recent decisions on obscenity. Here are some unresolved questions:

How far will the court go in admitting proof of the intention of the author? By his own testimony? By testimony of literary and art critics, sociologists, psychologists?

Can the judge or jury estimate the probable effect of certain words or pictures on "the average person?" Is there any sure way of evaluating "community standards"?

How many instances and what degree of delineation of physical description or acts are needed to turn a work of art into obscenity?

Can a genuine work of art still be prurient because it arouses lustful thoughts?

Are licensing ordinances, even when there is a legal determination through an injunction, within the First Amendment? Or must each case always be determined in criminal trial with the

Spring, 1960

right to a jury? Is an injunction a form of prior restraint of a First Amendment activity? Can movies be treated differently in this regard than newspapers and magazines?

Must each obscenity case be determined on a case-by-case basis, making the court the supreme board of censors, or is the yardstick of "prurient interests" definite enough?

Are Black and Douglas right in asserting that this area of morals is best left to the good sense of the individual and that any other method consists of thought control?

These are some of the problems still facing the courts. As long as they lean toward the "dangerous tendency" doctrine, they will find, as the courts have in sedition cases, that they will always be operating in the difficult area of legislating taste, morals, and thought. Since taste and morals are relative, it is dangerous to legislate from day to day, or from case to case. The time may come when the very secretiveness of sex, partly caused by formal or informal censorship, may end and the human body and normal human functions be considered with the clinical detachment of the physician examining a patient or of the artist in his studio painting a nude. The movement of art is toward the greater portrayal of "things as they are," to quote Ernest Hemingway. Is our law of obscenity part of a whole culturecomplex which inhibits the healthy and natural in a way which psychiatrists agree is unhealthy? Are natural impulses frustrated only to appear again on the surface in masked and surrogate form, socially acceptable but much more dangerous? In short, would nudism and sex be more dangerous than the prevalent and legally accepted expressions of repressed drives in the sadismmasochism complex which pervades our mass media? The great legal scholar Roscoe Pound once wrote:

I do not mean that the law should interfere in every human relation and in every situation where someone chances to think a social want may be satisfied thereby. Experience has shown abundantly how futile legal machinery may be in its attempts to secure certain kinds of interests. I am content to see in legal history the record of a continually wider recognizing and satisfying of human wants a more complete and effective elimination. of friction in human enjoyment of the goods of existence - in short, a continually more efficacious social engineering.

IX

The conclusion is difficult. If the members of the United States Supreme Court cannot agree, how can we ordinary mortals agree?

The two great literary "masterpieces" of the Twentieth Century which were banned for obscenity and then released for public consumption were James Joyce's Ulysses and D. H. Lawrence' Lady Chatterley's Lover. Both writers fought censorship--of their own works. But what did they think of each other? Richard EHmann, in his brilliant biography, James Joyce, reports that Joyce remarked of Lawrence, "That man writes very badly." Then Ellmann continues in a footnote:

When Lady Chatterlf?1/'s Lover began to vie with Ulysses as a book for tourists in Paris to buy, Joyce asked Stuart Gilbert to read him some pages from it. He listened carefully, then pronounced only one word: "Lush!" On Dec. 17, 1931, he wrote Miss Weaver (his benefactress) of Lady Chatterley's Lover: "I read the first two pages of the usual sloppy English, and S.G. read me a lyrical bit about nudism in the wood and the end which, outside of D. H. Lawrence's country at any rate, makes all the propaganda for itself." Lawrence had reciprocal feelings about Ulysses; as he said to Frieda Lawrence: ''The last part of it is the dirtiest, most indecent, obscene thing ever written. Yes it is, Frieda It is filthy."

One way out is to adopt the so-called "scintilla" rule. Several recent cases have held that a scintilla of evidence of artistic, literary, or scientific purpose is enough to justify publication. This is a facile, specious, and extreme position; purpose or intent is a deeply subjective factor. To devise a satisfactory test demands consideration of all three elements: purpose, content, and impact. The scintilla test avoids an objective criterion based upon the content itself and ignores the problem of community standards and probable impact.

An attempt to set up reasonable standards, based on realistic grounds, is contained in a recent study by a husband and wife team of psychiatrists, the Drs. Edward and Phyllis Kronhausen, entitled Pornography and the Law. They distinguish between hard core obscenity-of Lawrence's "pornography"-and erotic realism. Hard core obscenity "does stimulate, in the vast majority of people, what the law calls 'lascivious thoughts' or 'lustful desires.' It is aphrodisiac. It purposely builds up erotic excitement by a succession of erotic scenes. Its themes and methods, usually clustered in groups and determined by a kind of content analysis, are: seduction, defloration, incest, the permissive-seductive parentfigure, profaning the sacred, dirty words, supersexed males, nymphomaniac females, Negroes and Asiatics as sex symbols, homosexuality, and flagellation. Erotic realism, with a venerable

historic literary tradition, on the other hand, "insists on giving the sexual interest-and other basic human needs-their proportionate share in the particular medium of the artist." In short, the artist is trying to tell the whole truth about life.

The Kronhausens suggest that both intent and impact may be derived from the content and structure of the material. They reject the test of prevailing community standards by showing the extent of moral hypocrisy in our society, as seen for example by the Kinsey reports of the variances in sexual standards in geographic, cultural, and socio-economic groups. They reject the test of possible impact by denying Wertham's thesis that reading of erotic literature or horror comics is related to anti-social behavior. They agree with Dr. Theodore Reik that Freud's theory of sublimation is wrong, insisting that sex drives manifest themselves directly and not in surrogate form. Anti-social conduct is based on hostility aggression that has nothing to do with sex, horror books, or suggestive 'films, except in extreme cases when they act as triggering devices.

The authors contend that "Sexual behavior in all its 'normal' and non-hostile 'deviant' varieties is basically instinctual, though its modes of expression are largely 'learned.' On the other hand, sexual criminality and delinquency are the social symptoms of sick individuals in a sick society which has made the satisfaction of some of the basic biological and emotional human needs problematic and often unattainable. "The results of these cultural frustrations manifest themselves in the perversions of the natural drives, in neurotic and psychotic symptoms-as a socially conditioned variety of the latter-in delinquency or criminal behavior."

The real problem, they argue, lies deeper. The Russians after the 1917 Revolution permitted a great deal of sex freedom, but with the establishment of the Stalin dictatorship this was ended. France, the traditional home of sex freedom, has begun to censor erotic literature under the authoritarian De Gaulle regime. The Kronhausens conclude:

Sexual freedom can be the privilege only of a free society. Like dynamic psychology, it does not flourish in a climate of political tyranny and economic restriction. The more actual democracy a society allows, the more sexual freedom is granted to its members. The more authoritarian the political organization of a society, and the more discriminatory its economic structure, the less sexual freedom can it afford to grant to the mass of the population.

David Rubin

David I. Rubin, majoring in English Literature and Composition, is a senior in the College of Liberu] Arts. He transferred to Northwestern from Colgate in 1956. Last year he spent in Israel, first working on a communal farm (kibbutz), then studying Hebrew in Jerusalem. At Northwestern he won a Shuman Award in 1958 for excellence in writing, and is presently an undergraduate editor of THE TRI-QuARTERLY, of which he was one of the founders. He has received a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship for 1960-61, and win attend Harvard for graduate study in English.

The Line drawing is by Marilynn Lucille Smith, graduate of the Art Institute, and an artist for Time magazine.

THE PROPHET

SIMCHA

TENNENBAUM SAT GAILY beside the window of the bus, enjoying the pageant of Tel Aviv traffic. It was his last day in Israel, and he was glad. Six months in a kibbutz in the Negev, and two months half starving in Tel Aviv -he had had enough. With great joy, he contemplated going back into the "Exile." Let the Israeli chauvinists call it that! He felt no real attachment to Israel, and on what else could he act except his feelings? To have stayed longer would have been uncomfortable. It would have been unnatural.

Below him spread the Tel Aviv bus station, an hour glass of parti-colored sands tilting in the noon sun-specks, half the nation dropped through the station on a warm morning. Tel Aviv, Hill of Spring he was rolling now on the crest of that hill, and it was the middle of April, a balmy blue day. It was a day of triumph. Simcha was not deserting Israel. The country would survive without the personal conning of Simcha Tennenbaum. He was going home, home to Chicago to pick up his studies. And he was young, twenty-one years old. Life lay open before him wide as the Mediterranean Sea. Wider. Simcha regretted nothing.

And he was as anxious to return to New York as he had been anxious to leave.

The bus stalled in traffic, and Simcha sat back to breathe in the last humid pleasures of the city. The street was a struggle of wheels. Donkey carts and motorcycles, ancient lorries and De Soto taxis, the bus clogged in their midst-all yelled and bullied both ways up and down the narrow street. Along the curbs pedlars had spread oranges and bananas, and there were

Spring, 1960

heaps of almonds and strings of dried figs. The hucksters bleated .one against the other, singing out their bargains, BARGAINS! And away down the hill where the city fell into the sea, the Mediterranean lay glimmering, waiting for Simcha.

Looking down from the window, he saw a fishmonger dragging a cart of herring and carp laid on a white bed of splintered ice. The fishman smiled up silver-eyed at Simcha, and wiped his scaly hands on an apron of blood. He lifted a fat carp toward the window, and the young man turned away. It was true that Israel had not been what he had anticipated, but what ever is? Likeany young man, he had come to Israel as to a New World, the America of the East, hoping to be grafted to a new life, to be transformed. But Simcha had not changed, he knew that now, and all he had found in the new world, all he had really found was old Ralph GarfinkeL

Ralph in Hebrew became Raphael, but the man was still a forty-four year old bachelor from the Whitechapel district in London. They had both come under a government program that provided roundtrip fare in exchange for a year's work on a kibbutz in the Negev. The program was intended to encourage immigration, but it had collapsed while Simcha and Raphael were on the kibbutz, and Simcha had convinced the Jewish Agency to let Raphael and himself leave the country three months early. A lack of response was given as the official reason for ending the program, but in fact the offer had only attracted desperadoes and runaways like Raphael, metals too soft for the pioneer mold.

Simcha thought back to the first time he had seen Raphael. He had been shown his room in

the kibbutz, and there he had found Raphael, his new roommate, brooding with his hands in his lap at the edge of a cot. A gauze bandage was unraveling around one leg, and when Simcha had asked him what had happened, Raphael had mumbled, "Snake bite," and nothing more had passed between them for three days. Then on the third evening, after Simcha had brought supper to the ailing man, he dared to ask Raphael why he had come to Israel. "Why?" Raphael had blinked up from his dinner with the expression of a benign insect. "Why?" He feared that he had intruded too deep, but Raphael was only sounding. "To get rich quick," he had answered deliberately, and Simcha had been afraid even to smile. Then Raphael had laughed, and, pulling at a forelock, had said, "The truth is I'm as lost as you are." They were comrades. "What's that book you've been reading?" he had asked. "Existialism? Ah, Existism. I admire a fellow that's got a brain or two. I need someone that can understand my ideas."

The bus turned into the station, and Simcha scanned the travellers for his friend's face, but he did not see Raphael anywhere. Raphael had promised to be waiting in the station with their baggage when he returned from Jerusalem with the ship tickets. They still had to travel to the port in Haifa by six P.M. It was already past noon, and Simcha began to worry that Raphael had not come. They could leave Tel Aviv no later than four.

Raphael had refused to go with Simcha on the trip to Jerusalem. He had said that he would feel guilty walking down the holy streets, now that he was leaving. Walking where the whole Jewish past was paved into the roads, he would have felt like a traitor. Curiously, Raphael had begun to cleave to the land in these last days, and he spoke very little, cocooning himself in silence.

When all the passengers had gone down, he slipped his knapsack over one shoulder and stepped off the bus. Raphael was nowhere in sight, and Simcha cursed him in Arabic, but he was not surprised that he had failed to appear. It was like Rapha-el; he had sloughed off what responsibilities he could on the younger man, until Simcha had practically become his patriarch. When they had known they were leaving the kibbutz,Raphael had asked him if he could come with him to Tel Aviv. "We could make a go of it together in Tel Aviv," he had said. "We've become real partners here, you and 1. Shame to split up now, right?" He had been flattered at Raphael's affection, and had pitied him. So they came to Tel Aviv together. But he could not really be angry with poor Raphael,

and he was sure that he would turn up. Simcha would not let him spoil this last day.

He decided to wait another few minutes on the chance that Raphael would still come, and then go down to the waterfront and fetch him from their hotel. Bumping his way through the crowd, he passed out into the little streets around the station, streets that seemed to 'breed up merchants' stalls to prey on the traffic. Candy butchers went bawling down the walks, shouldering trays of sesame sweets. Yemenite boys strolled hand in hand amid the public wonders, an Eastern custom. The old clothes dealers, pot menders, cobblers, the newshawks-all orbited around the terminal. Simcha knew it all, and yet he was estranged from it. Even now he hung back, feeling that it was not his. Had he missed it all? Had he stayed blind to something? No, he was done with it now, the lovely and the unlovely. Fondly at the last, impersonally personal, he ernbraced the street.

He remembered that he had wanted a souvenir, some small thing that might evoke the spirit of the land. Simcha smiled to himself that that was a tourist's whim, but still he wanted it. Wandering through the stalls, the young man talked prices with the sellers, found flaws in their goods, bargained with a young boy over a shawl he did not want. He was pleased with his mastery of the spoken tongue, and he played with the tradesmen, smirking and brazen. It was as if the Hebrew language were his mask and foil. But still he walked heartless, and found no fitting token.

Coming to the end of the street, there was nowhere left to go. He stopped, and around him trilled and gurgled the babel of the world's languages. Alone, without even Raphael to quip with, he stood a foreigner, afraid to open his mouth. He wanted only to get out now. But the months had not been wasted. During the time he had been on the kibbutz, Simcha had decided to go into medicine. It was a noble thing to do with one's life, and it was sensible. The thought of being servant and master in one attracted him, and he was keen to resume his studies. He had come green and indecisive to Israel, and it had been an outing, a test of his strength. And behold! personal complexities, doubts, the destructive forces within a man, these things as if by magic had been resolved in him. Simcha felt healthy, he could afford to relax.

He walked quickly back into the bus station, but Raphael had not come. Poor Raphael, he thought. He had wild ideas, but he was a decent man. It was pitiful to see him without strength, a man without will, reduced to helpless depen-

dency. Lately, Simcha had had to coax him even to eat. Raphael kept repeating over and over that he was a failure, and Simcha had asked him how he failed. Had he failed to save the world? "Yes," the elder man had whispered, "I have failed to save the world."

But the man had been through enough. In World War II, he had fought with the Jewish Brigade, and in 1948 he had come to Israel for the first time to fight for Jewish independence. Not to kill Arabs, he had told Simcha, but to give the boys courage, to let them know they were not alone in the fight.

A shadowy form passing down trench-lines, whispering in the night, Englishman to Hungarian, to Pole, to Syrian. Jew to Jew, man to man. Not alone. His gentle hands upon the wounded, Raphael, the healer. Silhouetted against the whiteness of the moon, gazing up in wonder that the heavens could look so pure. Marching dusty by day, eyes burning. Spirit of the fight, the soul in armor.

Simcha started out of the station. He would have to chase Raphael only this last time. When the ship touched Marseilles, he would be free of the man. It was this last small delay, no more annoying than a fly over a sleeper's nose. But damn the inconvenience of the man! Why did he have to get mixed up with such a fellow?

As he passed through the station gate and into the bright street, Simcha found himself squinting at three beggars, blind men, holding hands. Shuffling and scraping, they crept along the wall, their three bodies linked into one, a protoplasmic flowing. Socketed heads topped with purple tams, laughing rags covering their shames, they swayed, darkling Eastern men, grinning, their voices rising, falling in a round: For you, Pray for you, We will pray for you.

Simcha stood caught before their three tin cups, rasping one against the other as they waved through the air; then he backed off and boarded a bus for the waterfront to find Raphael.

The Elath Hotel was a sandstone building packed among more sandstone buildings, distinguished only by its half-obliterated name shingle. Raphael was not in the room they shared with a third transient.

Simcha questioned the proprietress, who sat perspiring in a flowered cotton dress. "You don't know where he has gone?" he asked again, and suffered her shrewd glances. "Gone? Gone?" she shrugged heavily. "Mr. Garfinkel walked out the door. Like all the other guests that come to me. They come, they go.

I should worry about what they do? Ha! That's all I have to do is fill my head with the carryings on of my guests." She fanned herself with a newspaper and flickered her eyelashes at Simcha. "You're leaving today, aren't you, Mr. Tennenbaum? Where are you going now?" she cooed.

"Going home, Mrs. Kirshman. Raphael and I both."

"America," she sighed. "America. It's so nice to take a trip like you, seeing the whole world. Your father must be very rich, no? I could have gone to America," she confided, "if I had not been from Poland. I could have been rich there, instead of salted away in this place." She waved her wilted newspaper about the empty lobby. "Running a fourth class hotel."

It had been listed as fifth class in Simcha's tourist booklet. "Israel lives for the future," he consoled her.

"And for us old ones, who know enough to live for ourselves?"

"Israel waits for you to die," Simcha put forth a sympathetic smile, "just as Moses circled forty years in the desert until his slaves died."

He left Mrs. Kirshman sighing and fanning, crossing and uncrossing her legs, mouldering in the damp hotel lobby. "Don't forget to say goodby," she called after him, which meant pay up. There were thousands like her in Israel, haunted by phantoms of wealth and comfort, their visions stretching across the sea to electrified New York.

The street was bright and quiet. There was little activity between one o'clock and four, when shops closed and people had their dinners and napped. Simcha passed other hotels like the Elath, spread among cheap three-storey apartments, their sandstone walls glittering in the afternoon sun. He walked down Hayarken Street until it met Alienby Road, the main street of the city, climbing westward into town, and ending two blocks east in the sea.

Simcha stood uncertain at the corner. Raphael never strayed far off the waterfront, but where to begin looking for him? The whole business was fantastic, and yet it 'did not surprise. Simcha that Raphael had not met him at the station. Raphael hardly seemed to care about going back to England; Simcha had had to convince him that it was best. Well, he could not take the burden of another man's being on him. Raphael's dirty socks all over the floor back in their room, and his shaving brush still clotted with three-dayold suds: he had not even packed yet. If he did not care that much, to hell with him. Let him lay. Simcha was not going to excite himself now. "Alio! Alio!" he called, rousing the corner

Spring, 1960

kiosk man from his slumber, to ask him if he had seen Raphael. The little man nodded toward the sea, and said Raphael had passed about half an hour before; then he closed his eyes again. How did the kiosk man know, Simcha wondered. He always knew.

Perhaps Raphael had gone to say good-by to the English bankteller, his only other friend. They had met him one day when Simcha had gone to cash a check, and the teller had boasted to Raphael, "A thirty-year man in the country!" as if he were still clerking for the Empire. Raphael had admired him immediately.

The sea opened blue before him as Simcha came out of Allenby Road and crossed the seaside street to the wide promenade above the beach. Standing at the railing, he looked down at sunbathers already stretched along the sand. Beaches were the same everywhere: drowsy and mystical, sand and sun and water. Air, earth, water, and fire. The beach was essence. Stripped, a man could negotiate with himself here.

Four ships were anchored down in Jaffa Harbor. They rode like painted things upon the water, romances of corroding steel. Another was disappearing below the horizon, a wisp of blue smoke hanging above it. Fast, fast the ship fell until it blended in the haze at vision's end and dropped away, a smudge. So Simcha would sail forth that evening, disappearing under the curve of the earth, horizons rising, falling behind, and he always peering from the bow. Medicine was the same, always pushing forward. It was the motion that mattered, it was the struggle that he sought. Simcha thought with a spreading glow that he was sailing back into life.

Turning south, he began to stroll along the walk, passing tramps and vagrants, the sweepings of the city. Seaside stragglers, Raphael called them. Some of them stood looking out on the sea all day long, as if the sea were about to speak, warming their bones. Far down along the railing, Simcha saw a solitary form, and when he had taken another few steps he knew that it was Raphael.

He approached his friend slowly, not wanting to surprise or frighten him. Raphael was leaning heavily against the railing, looking seaward. He had grown thin living in Tel Aviv, but he had taken on a healthy tan, spending so much time beside the water.

Simcha stood beside him, but Raphael did not stir. "Raphael," he said softly. "Raphay-ye-el," he called the name in a sing-song. "Raphael." Simcha shook the tranced man's shoulder.

Raphael squinted up at the intruder, his black

hair lifting about his head in the sea breeze. "What?" he mumbled. "What's that?" His eyes swam over Simcha's features, then he smiled slightly, and nodded in recognition. "Oh, it's you, Simcha." He reached out and touched his friend's .face. "Hello, Sirncha."

"You were supposed to meet me at the station, remember?"

"You know, Simcha, it's a strange thing, the way I get myself so far off. So deep into things. I came a long way to get back to you just now."

"You know that we're leaving the country, don't you, Raphael?"

"Leaving the country?" Raphael smiled nervously. "Oh yes, that's right. We were to go today. You Jerusalem" - he pointed west - "then back this morning." His finger circled back to the waterfront. He seemed to have difficulty comprehending the distance covered. "How was the trip?"

"Lovely. I have the tickets. Are you ready to go?" Simcha looked down at the breaking surf, and felt the sheer weight of the man upon him. Still, the vision of leaving Raphael abandoned and floundering in Tel Aviv had been too much for his imagination, and so they had remained, as Raphael said, partners. But the attachment was nearing an end.

"I've been thinking, Simcha. As usuaL"· Raphael laughed and coughed and cleared his throat. He looked down at his shoes, sad as two wet spaniels. "I've decided to stay," he said, swallowing, and lifting his face to meet Simcha's. "I've decided to stay and give it a go."

Simcha let the words sink in. He never showed surprise at any revelation. "You're sure?"

"Yes, Simcha. I was just now thinking it through. It's clear as a jewel in my brain. If I could only make you see it. The future, I'm thinking about." Raphael took hold of Simcha's arm, his face shining. "This land will bloom gloriously. Why, it's growing everywhere, everywhere. You can actually feel it, Simcha, can't you? It's young and vital, it will make me young again too."

"Then all I've said hasn't much fazed you, has it? You're sailing in the clouds, you're like a kid about this. Look at yourself once; a bachelor, forty-four years old, no language, no skill, no family here. You're not equipped to stay. But I'm through arguing' with you." He shook Raphael's hand from his arm.

"There's the prophecy, you know. We're living in prophetic times. There'll come a day when the world will look to Israel. It's a land of hope, don't you see, Simcha, the hope of the world."

Raphael believed that Israel had been destined

to lead the world into the day of the Messiah. He foresaw the nations of the earth revolving In perfect harmony around the fixed star,' Jerusalem. And somehow he, Raphael Garfinkel, would dispense his justice and mercy over all. Prophet, Pope, King, Saviour. But the oracle was sounding again

"You don't believe in God, do you, Simcha? That's too bad. Because what God said is coming to pass right before your eyes, and you can't see it. You're giving it all up. Write it off as an adventure, eh?"

Raphael believed that God inhabited the dark side of the moon. He belived that there would come a man who would reverse the force of gravity, and rising on a huge platform from the North Pole, that man would unite with God. That man would choose a woman, and together they would ascend to God, the most perfect flowers of the species, and that man would progene a new race, sharing life with God in the dark of the moon. God had touched him, he had confided to Simcha, he believed himself that man.

"Go back to London," Simcha said.

"London? London? England is finished." He swept England aside with his palm. "The future is here. It's a miracle, don't you see? Jews flocking in from every corner of the world. God promised Moses and Abraham before him, and now the promise is kept. We are a nation again, a nation on a land. We were chosen to be examples, you know that, and the goyim will follow our light because it was meant to be so. Justice and love are here. Here!" It was his final, his most eloquent statement. "I am a Jew. That's what matters. I can make a life in my own land. I can be a man, not just a Jew. No more an outsider. Don't you see that, Simcha, boy? Don't you see the beauty of it?" He clasped Simcha again. "There'll be others to help me."

Simcha drew back, and took Raphael's ticket from the envelope. "Here, Raphael, show it to your grandchildren." He started for the Elath to get his things.

"Wait!" Raphael cried. "That's a nasty thing to say to a man." He ran to catch up to the striding young man. "I'm going with you to the bus station, at least. Least I can do is see you off. You've been good to me." Raphael smiled up at his hurrying friend. "Don't think I don't appreciate he had to trot-skip to keep up with Simcha.

Simcha and Raphael stood together in the melee of the bus station. He had just missed the threethirty bus to Haifa, and the next one would not

leave until four. Raphael struggled to take Simcha's knapsack from his wet back, and Simcha was sweating from carrying his heavy grip.

"Whew!" Raphael blotted his brow. "Whew! Dangerous running through the streets in this heat. Sunstrokes and all." Raphael smiled sickly through his ruddy skin. His teeth were green with tartar. "How 'bout a glass of tea? You didn't have any lunch, did you, Simcha? Let me treat you to a sweet and tea. Good-by present. Oh, I have a little money." There were several cafes opposite the bus station. "At least we can 'sit down for a few minutes."

The two men crossed the street and entered one of the open cafes. They dropped the .Iuggage beside a table and sat down. Raphael pretended to read the menu, and Simcha ordered tea and two cheese-filled buns.

"It's not an easy language, Simcha. Oh, I'll get on to it in time. Though you have done remarkably well in so short a time."

The tea and cakes were set before them, and Raphael said, "Toda." When the waiter had left, he winked. "That wasn't bad, was it?"

Simcha slumped in his chair and stared through the tawny tea. He held up the glass, and looked through it at Raphael's distorted features. Raphael chattered about what a mercenary brute Mrs. Kirshman was, charging Simcha for an extra day because he had stayed beyond two o'clock. He thought that was low. A long silence followed between them. Raphael eyed his bun.

Finally he took a bite from it. "Mmmm," he said. "Very good. Excellent cheese, Simcha. Try a bite. He took another mouthful, his lips smacking as he chewed. "Mmmm. Didn't realize I was so hungry. That's the way hunger is, though, sneaks up on you. Don't I know?" He laughed and took a swallow of tea.

"Well," Raphael ran on, "we've had our times, haven't we, Simcha? Things we won't forget easily, memories worth the world." He reflected a moment. "Like that morning in the melon field, remember? It must have covered dunams and dunams, and we were creeping along snipping 'em and pitching 'em, up a row, down a row, never even lifting our heads. My, but that was hard on a' fellow's back. Not for those kibbutzniks though, never heard them let out a whimper. Out-there groggy at 5:30 in the morning, with nothing in the belly. Lord, it was brutal. That time, it must have been about seven o'clock when the sun was just starting to burn, I felt all in, and straightened up a minute, and there you were. Me coming down one row, and you going up the other. Out there in the middle of that field with

Spring, 1960

nothing else in sight, nothing but snarled melon vines all around to trip a fellow. It did seem like the end of the world. And what did you say? 'Doctor Livingstone, I presume?'" Raphael struck the table and laughed till tears were in his eyes. "Then we broke open that melon. Cut it to pieces with our clipping shears, right out there in the field. And the picking boss, Comrade Rosa, glaring at us all the while for eating up the profits. You and I, standing out there together, laughing and eating. Oh, I shall never forget it, Simcha. A beautiful moment it was." Raphael shook his head, his face beaming with the recollection.

Simcha smiled faintly. "You know they were about ready to throw you off the place when we pulled out. You had a fine reputation, the prophet."

"And what about that sabra girl, Naomi? She was really wild about you. She was beautiful to watch when you danced together. Like swamp grass in the wind. An animal grace, she had. You were a virgin until you went to the kibbutz, weren't you, Simcha?"

"Why did you never marry, Raphael?" he countered.

"Never found a girl worthy enough," he answered directly. "But Naomi, there was a real queen. Was it hard to say good-by?" Raphael leaned toward Simcha.

"I wrote her a note."

"You're a strange fellow, Simcha. You must

have a steel rod for a backbone." Raphael gulped the rest of his tea.

"What are you going to do now, Raphael? I mean, what are your plans?"

"Oh, I'll find work somewhere. Get a foothold. I know a little bookkeeping."

"Half the population are bookkeepers."

"My father was a tailor."

"Three tailors to the city block."

Raphael laughed and threw up his arms. "Oh, I'll do something. Do I really seem so hopeless, Simcha? There are times, you know, when I feel no better than those beggars." He pointed to the three blind beggars chanting in the doorway, their cups clanging together. "Sometimes I fear I'll wind up like those fellows in the gutter. Then that's all swept away and I am seized up in hopes and visions. A real extremist, I am. Do you ever feel those things?"

"I'm afraid we don't have much in common, Raphael." Simcha looked at his watch.

"Maybe you're clever enough not to let yourself feel them," Raphael interpreted. "Or at least not to take such feelings to heart. Do you think you'll ever come back, Simcha?"

"It's not in my plans."

"Not even as a tourist?" Raphael sighed a little. "Then a few more minutes and we say goodby forever. Peculiar thing when you stop to think of it. Just sever the threads, and off you go. It's like seeing you die."

Simcha started. "I'm doing what I want to do."

"Oh, yes, of course. But just the same, isn't it strange the couples life brings together, tea rs apart? Like us two, coming to Israel just together, and, different as we are, still becoming pals. It's the timing of the thing strikes me. And the sympathies that work between people. Like us two, different as you say we are, still there's something that's kept us stuck together. Something more than your pity, I mean."

How much did Raphael really know, Simcha wondered.

"I don't know that we're as different as you think. But I wish I could get you to see the Land as I do. I dream about it at night. It's an intuition I have. But there's room for a dreamer here. Even a madman like me. Harmless, you see. The Land needs an imagination, a daring spirit. Boldness. It's a good long time since there's been a real prophet afoot in the world Raphael mused.

"Let's go, Raphael. It's nearly four." They rose to leave, and Raphael slipped Simcha's bun into his pocket. Simcha paid the waiter while Raphael fought the knapsack onto his back again. Together, they went out into the afternoon heat.

"Though I'll admit that the picture around here isn't exactly the fulfillment of a prophecy. Oof! Filthy, diseased slums. No roses blooming hereabouts. And why are the religious people being trampled under? Old time socialists hanging onto political power. But the hope is here. The place is teeming. They need someone like me, Simcha. I have a destiny. I feel God's hand hard onme

Simcha boarded the bus and stowed his suitcase, then came down again and lifted his knapsack from the ground. He held out his hand.

"Good-by, Raphael. Good luck."

Raphael shook his hand absently, and raised his face, gazing away over the buildings into the deep sky.

Simcha was afraid he was going to prophesy. Turning quickly away, he got on the bus and found a seat beside an open window. Raphael stood as before, gaping at the sky. "Raphael!" Simcha called, taking ten pounds from his wallet, the last of his Israeli money. "Raphael! Have you enough money?"

The bus started and the driver raced the engine. A flock of newsboys had gathered around Raphael, laughing and jeering at him. "Dumb jackass! one of them hooted, and they all took up the chant.

Lurching, the bus began to roll into the thickening traffic. "Raphael!" Simcha shouted, leaning far out the window. The elder man stirred and turned his shining, fast-clouding countenanc� toward Simcha. "Take the money! Simcha rolled the bill into a ball and threw it toward him. Raphael lunged, but it dropped far short, and the newsboys fell on it, rolling and howling, leaving Raphael straddled on all fours, a dark shadow amid torn news sheets.

An Arab boy ran alongside the creeping bus, waving a bunch of poppies, deep red, potent, up toward Simcha. Spring was on the land. Winter wheat that had greened the fields, golding now under the sun. Orchards of apple trees and plum, white and pink-blossomed, fig trees filling sweet. A land of white villages studded across the valleys and through the hills. And everywhere, everywhere, wild poppies were springing.

"How much?" Simcha called down to the boy. "Ten grush."

Spring, 1960

Donald T Torchiana

This is the sixth of the series of articles on living American poets, written especially for THE TRI-QUARTERLY.

Donald Thornhill Torchiana, born in Philadelphia, left coLLege at the age of nineteen to serve in the U.S. Army Air Force. Stationed in England from 1944 until the end of the Second World War, he flew twenty-four missions over Germany as a B-17 pilot with the 8th Air Force. He returned to De Pauw University, and completed his undergraduate studies in 1947. He received his advanced degrees in English Literature (M.A., 1949, Ph.D., 1953) at the State University of Iowa, where he taught as graduate assistant and instructor until coming to Northwestern in 1953. He is an assistant professor in English.

Mr. Torchiana has published a number of articles on recent figures in American and English letters, and is now at work upon a book to be called W. B. Yeats and the Anglo-Irish Eighteenth Century.

HEART'S NEEDLE: SNODGRASS STRIDES THROUGH THE UNIVERSE

THE NAME SNODGRASS may sound novel for a sparkling new poet, but William De Witt Snodgrass not only glories in his name, he also hymns it, apostrophizes it in his first volume of poetry, Heart's Needle (New York, 1959), which has already won the $1000 poetry prize of The Ingram Merrill Foundation. Trained in the poetry workshop of the State University of Iowa, Snodgrass, now in his mid-thirties, was Quaker-born, reared in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, and has since followed one of the likely paths for the contemporary American poet. He took himself through Geneva College, endured the Navy and America's last romantic invasion of the world in World War II, and turned up soon after in Iowa City, resplendent in cast-off Navy costume, great head of hair and flowing beard, and properly abstracted poet's eye. Now, considerably clipped, he is an established poet, a family man, and a teacher at Wayne State University in Detroit. Unprepossessing as this background may seem-Robert Lowell in the blurb

calls the workshop "the most sterile of sterile places"-Heart's Needle is something of a triumph. At its calm, insistent best it has both credo and style:

"The world's not done to me; it is what I do; whom I speak shall be; I music out my name and what I tell is who in all the world I am.""

IIn 1948, when I first set eyes on Snodgrass, Iowa City was still basking in its self-inflicted glory as the Athens of the Midwest. It was a retired-farmer's town and county seat, with a leisurely bus line, a good hospital, and a univer-

-Quotations are by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., publisher. Heart's Needle was copyrighted, 1959, by William D. Snodgrass.

William De Witt Srwdgrass (photograph by Gerda Peterich)

sity of outlandish maverick decency. The school also aspired to be as creative as the state's more celebrated hogs. And it was. In short, after the war, it was just the place for as seedy a group of graduate students in arts and letters as ever fell off the Rock Island Line. Working for advanced degrees in literature and the fine arts, they gave the school a name certainly less deplorable, if not more exciting, than that swished about by the famed Scotch Highlanders, corn-fed lassies of 18 or so, who droned about in what seemed to be the year-long football season. Snodgrass was one of this pride of painters, writers, actors, musicians, sculptors, and critics that gave the university what class it had. The more orthodox, timid graduate student, like myself, was generally too swamped during the day with the traditional demands of advanced work to see much of them. But outside of class our lives were often joyously the same.

We lived in a pleasant half-world of hockshops, all night restaurants, Quonset huts or breezy rooming houses variously called The Empty Arms, the Flop House, or Gus's. To augment the G.!. Bill or the money from an occasional stint of teaching, we used to wash dishes, dig ditches, feed the mice and dogs in University Hospital, or mop the floors,

Spring, 1960

rent boats on the sluggish Iowa River, tote parcels at Christmas time, sell blood to the Catholic hospital, clerk in a drummers' hotel, sling hash, thresh wheat, or cheer our wives as they went off to work in the morning. To punctuate this grey round of study and subsistence, we could always slide into Joe's Airliner, where the fraternity mob bemused itself in beer, or Kenney's, haunt of the slender-wristed crowd, or the Antlers, a laborer's bar which boasted a blind piano player. We usually went to the last, if only for the fights. Then there was the frequent two-day poker game heavily attended by the poets. We also had a basketball team-one year Walter Van 'I'ilburg Clark played on it. Nor should I omit the sprawling literary set-tos in the invariable small rooms, filled with shouts and whispers, with the reproduction of Rouault's "The Old King" on some wall, the inevitable name-dropping, and large quantities of Old Tub, an obscure Beam whiskey, downed. Yet there was also the half-finished novel, the rough draft of a story, the unread source-book, the typescript of poems, the crated pictures, or the last chapter of a thesis sitting in the next room.

The personalities were just as gaga. Aside from the usual run of intense New Yorkers, edgy disciples of the Southern Fugitives, and sprucedup rubes (me) from small Midwestern colleges, there were some real stars, especially among the writers. One was a Golden Gloves heavyweight who had also been a star reporter; another had been a sax man in the Krupa band. Don Peterson, a poet, had played with a French basketball team. His friend, Herb Wilner, a short-story writer, had been captain of the Brooklyn College football team. Two others systematically swindled a crackpot economist out of $20,000 that he sank into a newspaper they edited, which piled up under a porch. Many .were from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. One had driven a Marshall Field truck. Another, a graduate of West Point, ate on 75 cents a day and drove an $8.00 car, for awhile; his triumph came when his first volume of poems was reviewed as the work of a most disciplined artist. Two more were millionaires' sons, or acted as if they were. Many had elaborate marital lives. Just as many had been shot at in the war. Snod'grass suffered through a divorce.

I usually spotted him as he climbed the Flop House stairs to play chess with a friend of ours named Ace Levang, or when he was heading through campus for the writers workshop. This complex of versifiers and writers that he mixed with could, on occasion, be an especially arrogant, slow-smiling lot of empire builders. They had long before canonized the metaphysicals and

French symbolists and were most solemn about the sanctity of Flaubert, Stendhal, and James. The Authorized Version was Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity, the Logos was to be found in the Kenyon Review, usually in the pronouncements of Tate ("Allen") or R. P. Warren ("Red"). AU the King's Men enjoyed an enormous vogue; and then it was that F. R. Leavis was known for wit. For the more enterprising, such visiting writers as Robert Lowell offered the more exotic fare of Catullus, Villon, St. John of the Cross, Rilke, Kafka, and Lorca. There was also a bit of log-rolling. When the Western 'Review, Iowa's little mag, wasn't pontificating about teachers-aswriters or writers-as-teachers (I can't remember which), like Addison and his little Senate it sat attentive to its own applause and pushed the local boys rather heavily. Then too, there came that breathless moment when Iowa fell heir to the O. Henry Awards, the annual selection of prize stories. It was announced in the next volume that eight of the best twenty-three short stories for 1954 had been done by Iowa writers.

There were bound to be casualties in such a system. One graduate now edits the fiction of a slick magazine in New York City and affects gym shoes in the winter. Another in Chicago has taken to correcting the unsophisticated notions of young "beat" writers. One married a swimmer and wrote a novel about girls' dormitories. Several have made $100,000 inroads into Hollywood. Another at Bard drapes himself in open shirts and suntans and fondles his Phi Beta Kappa key conspicuously in public. One is a JP in Greenwich. A number have sold out to San Francisco and are holed up in the State College there. A director got himself into Life by memorializing the Iowa war dead and thereby added a new terror to modem warfare. But Snodgrass .and a few others survived. They have written what appear to be a number of excellent poems. In doing so they have justified, I think, all the superficial irritations I've listed. For when Snodgrass evokes the dark straggling parks, the tinny Quonset huts, the stinking marshes, spring roads or drifting midnight snow, the July 4th tornado of 1953, the humming hospital corridors, and the God-awful neglected specimens in the school museum, he not only conjures up the buried life we lovedwhat other word can I use?-but he also blesses it with a rare elegance and authority. Thus to trace the order and development of his poetry is also to accept much of the folly and pretention of those days as finally accidental, ultimately irrelevant to that golden buckle on the Corn Belt that Athens.

II

These landmarks dot the nineteen individual poems that complement the "Heart's Needle" cycle in Snodgrass' volume. These nineteen are arranged in chronology of subject but may be more handily viewed according to their easily demarked themes: memories of Navy service and home town; an early disintegrating marriage; new love and second marriage; and then, finally, the poet's successful assertion of integrity amid the stately indifferent groves of academe. Very daringly, very triumphantly, filled with memories of his child riding on his shoulders, he can at last chant aloud in selfintoxication the final refrain from the poem "These Trees Stand .":

If all this world runs battletl.eld or worse, Come, let us wipe our glasses on our shirts: Snodgrass is walking through the universe.

The early record of war return, home town, and broken marriage is obviously painful. Throughout such poems as "Returned to Frisco, 1946," "MHTIS OU TIS," "Home Town," "Orpheus," and "The Marsh" runs the theme of alienation in the No Man's land of postwar America or in an increasingly chilly marriage. If not his most successful poems, they nonetheless demonstrate Snodgrass' assimilation of what he has called the "symbolist-metaphysical" tradition taught at Iowa and his subsequent pushing on to a more relaxed, laconic idiom of his own. Take, for instance, "Returned to Frisco, 1946." It celebrates the homecoming accorded returned U.S. seamen some time after the war's conclusion. Their grand view is that of the unholy garbage peddled by hucksters of the old lies, a people for whom sailors are amorous, steakeating "pigs along the rail." This charming vista of rewon freedom and choice, illusory as ever, is focused in the final ironic image:

Off the port side, through haze, we could disce:n Alcatraz, lavender with flowers. Barred, The Golden Gate, fading away astern, Stood like the closed gate of your own backyard.

"MHTIS OU TIS" takes the central pun of the Odyssey, IX, for its pivot and then casts up what will become a familrar paraclete, the psychiatrist, in the poet's verse. This man, R. M. Powell, whom Snodgrass never saw in a new experimental psychotherapy, is eulogized in the sestet of the sonnet as the "dead blind guide" who led him to drop his disguise as No Man and name his name. Perhaps the subject is a fairly standard one-the torment of a regimented life dedicated to killing; defiant repudiation; the

disguises of adequacy cast aside for the nainful acceptance of self. Still, the poem is notable. For all its tangled obscurity and somewhat highfalutin allusion, it specifies Snodgrass' unaltered trust in the defiant mind and his gathering resolve to name his own name. "Home Town" turns much the same divided light on the poet's origins. Written late in 1956, the poem allows Snodgrass, against his will, to turn his back on the ancient challenges of small-town America: the glittering dare of sex pursuit and the swaggering approval of boys of all ages. These lures are dressed out in verses picturing the endless night prowl of sheathed adolescents, whom we no longer hang but keep in school, through the perpetual carnival of their days. Returned after fifteen years, the poet has not stilled his fear nor his desire for these illusions. Hence he asks himself:

Pale soul, consumed by fear of the living world you haunt, have you learned what habits lead you to hunt what you don't want; learned who does not need you; learned you are no one here?

The same question is posed in "Orpheus" and "The Marsh." This time it touches even closer to home. It touches his first marriage. The one poem employs the Orpheus myth, a ready identification for husband and poet. It also clearly identifies the underworld of his marital difficulties with the imago of our largely uninhabitable twentieth-century cities. The ashes of civic spirit, war rubble, gangland, poverty, municipal bribery, all these unacknowledged pledges of the cash nexus that we sUe1titute for humanity, become the homesite for her who cannot love. The hope is that man and wife who do not love, who do not trust or know each other, may yet return to light otherwise. So the modern Orpheus begs the dark powers for the return of his bride in the radical fleshliness from which she has fallen, as did Eve, turned into stone:

"I sing, as the blind beggars sing, To ask of you this little time -All lives foreclose in their due dayThat flowered bride cut down in Spring, Struck by the snake, your underling."

But she wavers. He, despite his resolve, doubts. He turns; she is gone. Fear again has forced the question, which questioned the will. "The Marsh" tries to answer it. And this implied answer is unapologetically pulsing, forthright like the heart or like the poet's later cardinal spokesman or like the bright splash of red that adorns the covers of his volume. Lingering near what was in real life a swamp on the road to Cedar Rapids,

Spring, 1960

which is to say the worst swamp possible, writing the poem while proctoring a test for a colleague (exams can be worthwhile), Snodgrass quietly surveys the bog of his marriage:

Swampstrife and spatterdock lull in the heavy waters; some thirty little frogs spring with each step you walk; a fish's belly glitters tangled near rotting logs.

Over by the gray rocks muskrats dip and circle. Out of his rim of ooze a silt-black pond snail walks inverted on the surface toward what food he may choose.

You look up; while you walk the sun bobs and is snarled in the enclosing weir of trees, in their dead stalks.

This world of dead limbs, ensnared sunlight, and faded yellow lilies in the mud is indeed a world of "swampstrife," where a suspiciously bardlike snail must proceed unnaturally to sustain himself. In this mess, the question forces itself upon the poet in the last two lines:

Stick in the mud, old heart, what are you doing here?

and is answered in the asking.

If this bitter theme of the tormented will was not usually so neatly taken by the throat as in "The Marsh," the subsequent love poems to his second wife, Janice, leave no doubt of Snodgrass' growing joy. Orpheus becomes Papageno of The Magic Flute; pride overtakes rejection; while in a poem like "Song," the self-righteous proprieties of an enforced union yield to a much more splendid bed-rattling matrimony. The amorous landscape of toadstools and clipped lawns is replaced by that of root, tree, and soil. Powerfully domestic and erotic, these love poems are probably best represented by the stanzas of "Winter Bouquet" that celebrate a reunion with Janice. I am probably over impressed with this sublime and cockeyed mixture of fragile stems, parched seeds, squealing brats, aerial sensuality, and wintry sunshine, but I really don't care. Here are the first and last of its three stanzas:

Her hands established, last time she left my room, this dark arrangement for a winter bouquet: collected bittersweet, brittle stemmed Scotch broom, perennial straw-flowers, grasses gone to seed, lastly, the dry vaginal pods of mildweed. These relics stay here for her when she's away.

Now she's home. Today I lifted them, like charms in the March sunshine to part the pods and blow white bursts of quilly weedseed for the wide arms

and eyes of the children squealing where they drift across the neighbors' cropped lawns like an airlift of satyrs or a conservative, warm snow.

The authority of these "relics"-surrounding a Snodgrass gone to seed, then transformed by, love into delights for children on more constrained beds of grass-is part of a human recovery also established in "The Operation." In the first stanzas of that poem, Snodgrass doubtless stays too close to the standard version of the hospital. He also tends to overwrite, perhaps in an effort to counter the obvious. Thus the props of masked attendants, staring crowd of bedraggled patients, and self-identification with forlorn Pierrot and schoolgirl at her first sacrament overplay the theme of guilt purified through sacrifice. Snodgrass himself admits to having been deep in psychosomatic literature at the time. His second wife was also supporting him. And the screaming child in the background of the second stanza is at once too pat and, perhaps, even too obviously personal. Yet to say this is only to admit the success of th«; concluding stanza:

Into flowers, into women, I have awakened. Too weak to think of strength, I have thought all day, Or dozed among standing friends. I lie in night, now, A small mound under linen like the drifted snow.

Only by nurses visited, in radiance, saying, Rest. Opposite, ranked office windows glare; headlamps, below, Trace out our highways; their cargoes under dark tarpaulins, Trucks climb, thundering, and sirens may Wail for the fugitive. It is very still. In my brandy bowl

Of sweet peas at the window, the crystal world Is inverted, slow and gay.

His recovery into "radiance," recalling Snodgrass' other paeans to human sunshine, also recovers the world. And that world, concentrated in the flowered brandy bowl, a gift from Jan, is also transformed and purified. Geometric glare and charted ways, other dark burdens under wraps, even those also pursued by guilt, are caught in this makeshift vase of flowers. There all have their rush and bitterness broken, "inverted, slow and gay," into stillness.

After such wholeness, Snodgrass' resulting poetic stand is something to behold. For all I know, it marks a new series of attitudes in American poetry. For example, it can establish the new poet, the university poet, only to recall us to an ancient ideal of education that has all but disappeared. It also condemns our bustling, moneyed civilization only to expose it as less vigorous and alive than the poet. And it mocks the received belief in America's world superiority only to show us to be a world minority of frightened up-

starts who deny our souls and content ourselves with looking down. I think specifically of the poems "A Cardinal, "April Inventory," and "The Campus on the Hill."

Leaving Iowa and its creative life, where poetry might be regarded as a living craft rather than as a dead subject, where you might even learn among friends, Snodgrass found Cornell dull. There is no other word, at least not for a poet, to describe a world where little if any creative work is done. "The Campus on the Hill" derives trom his life in Ithaca. Recalling Karl Shapiro's earlier "University,". Snodgrass' poem is nevertheless sharply different. Shapiro scored the University of Virginia for its treachery to Jefferson's ideal. With an eye on Ezra Cornell, who was a Quaker, Snodgrass scores "the children of the nouveaux ricnes" for the neglected tendance of their souls. In condemning them, he really condemns the dominant America of the 'fifties that one great static, monolithic, irresponsible suburb perched variously and imperturbably near New York, Chicago, Cleveland, St. Louis, Los Angeles-everywhere:

Tomorrow has broken out today: Riot in Algeria, in Cyprus, in Alabama; Aged in. wrong, the empires are declining, And China gathers, soundlessly, like evidence. W�at �hall I say to the young on such a morning?Mmd IS the one salvation?-also grammar?No; my little ones lean not toward revolt. They Are the Whites, the vaguely furiously driven who resist Their souls with such passivity As would make Quakers swear. All day, dear Lord, all day They wear their godhead lightly.

"April Inventory" is even more outrageous. Behind it lies a year of meditating the monstrous examination in literary history for the Ph.D. in English at Iowa. There were also trips to the university dental clinic; Mahler's "Lob des Hohen Verstands," taught to one Rachel Chester a most promising young painter; lessons in moth lore and affection for Jan's daughter by an earlier marriage; and then a dying old man, Fritz Jarck, whom Snodgrass tended in the hospital. From this unpromising assortment emerged a poem that brazens forth a song of sweetness and humility in education that sets it once again aglimmering in the world that sounds and shines. Here is the whole thing:

The green catalpa tree has turned All white; the cherry blooms once more. In one whole year I haven't learned A blessed thing they pay you for. The blossoms snow down in my hair; The trees and I will soon be bare.

The trees have more than I to spare. The sleek, expensive girls I teach, Younger and pinker every year, Bloom gradually out of reach. The pear tree lets its petals drop Like dandruff on a tabletop.

The girls have grown so young by now I have to nudge myself to stare. This year they smile and mind me how My teeth are falling with my hair. In thirty years I may not get Younger, shrewder. or out of debt.

The tenth time, just a year ago, I made myself a little list Of all the things I'd ought to know, Then told my parents, analyst, And everyone who's trusted me I'd be substantial, presently.

I haven't read one book about A book or memorized one plot. Or found a mind I did not doubt. I learned one date. And then forgot. And one by one the solid scholars Get the degrees, the jobs, the dollars. And smile above their starchy collars.

I taught my classes Whitehead's notions; One lovely girl, a song of Mahler's. Lacking a source-book or promotions, I showed one child the colors of A luna moth and how to love.

I taught myself to name my name, To bark back, loosen love and crying; To ease my woman so she came, To ease an old man who was dying. I have not learned how often I Can win, can love, but choose to die.

I have not learned there is a lie Love shall be blonder, slimmer, younger; That my equivocating eye Loves only by my body's hunger; That I have forces, true to feel, Or that the lovely world is real.

While scholars speak authority And wear their ulcers on their sleeves, My eyes in spectacles shall see These trees procure and spend their leaves. There is a value underneath The gold and silver in my teeth.

Though trees turn bare and girls turn wives, We shall afford our costly seasons; There is a gentleness survives That will outspeak and has its reasons. There is a loveliness exists, Preserves us, not for specialists.

But it is a cardinal, in the poem of the same name, that makes the poet's credo explicit. Fleeing the unnatural rhythms of marching air cadets, superturnpikes, soaring golf balls, and airplane engines-all the cadences of so-called free enterprise, that ring any campus-the poet finds himself alone at last, free to tinker with his own rhythms. He spies a cardinal and first identifies the bird with "the ancient pulse of violence"

Spring, 1960

that lies beneath the slogans and rhythms he has just escaped. But then he sees deeper. In doing so he shoots beyond the occasionally easy indictments of his earlier poems. The cardinal, after all, has a tough, tenacious grip on life, sings his claim with shrill eloquence. And so must all singing creatures, saith the poet:

Selfish, unorthodox, they live upon our leavings. Boys or cats or hawks can scare them out of song. Still, long as they are Iiving, they are not still for long.

Each year the city leaves less of trees or meadows; they nest in our very eaves and say what they have to say. Assertion is their credo; style tells their policy.

III

Before turning to the "Heart's Needle" cycle, I probably ought to say something about Snodgrass' technique. The themes and development I have just loosely sketched, with their casual insistence that the university be considered part of the larger world, are gripped by a technical mastery rare even among academic poets. To be sure, Snodgrass has gone to school with Auden, Robert Lowell, and Marianne Moore. His wit is that of most modern poets. He can load his poems with the best of them. His verses abound with the metaphoric crockery of mid-century life, realistic diction, symbolic landscapes, double-dealing language, outrageous puns, partial rhymes, stretches of dead-pan prose, syllabic metres, sudden line breaks, accent groupings, and a most polished surface. But he has not stopped there, as have so many of his workshop compatriots. He has assimilated his influences; these devices are not ends in themselves. He doesn't play solemn games with words, and hence with life. Nor is his facility that of the schoolboy at his exercises. You don't find Snodgrass hymning a dull Georgia boyhood or a weekend in Des Moines in the borrowed cadences of Yeats's "The Tower" or in the variegated language of Stevens' "The Comedian as the Letter C." He knows better. It is true that he owes most of what he knows about poetry to his Iowa training; he also recognizes the danger of turning that learning into dogma. In his current effort to write poetry in the larger tradition of Wordsworth, Hardy, and Chaucer, he has gone beyond his Iowa mentors, especially after working with Randall Jarrell at Colorado. Consequently, you can find in his work the un-

abashed presence of Midwest farmland, the deceptively simple rhythms and statements of nursery rhymes, along with many an unblushing use of such words as "loveliness" and "gentleness." This combination of hard indirection and simplicity gives a tone of dreamy precision to his work, especially in his momentary human scenes, like snowdrops in water, that are so full of implications. The last stanza in "At the Park Dance," for instance, offers a metallic image of the solar system, borrowed from his little girl's game of jacks, and brushes it against the momentary touch of a child's finger:

Beyond, jagged stars are glinting like jacks hurled farther than eyes can gather; on the dancefloor, girls turn, vague as milkweed floats bobbing from childish fingers.

And so it is, a dance of stars and girls, infinite and finite, cold and tender, vague and permanent. My second example is the fifth poem of the "Heart's Needle" series:

Winter again and it is snowing; Although you are still three, You are already growing Strange to me.

You chatter about new playmates, sing Strange songs; you do not know Hey ding-a-ding-a-ding Or where I go

Or when I sang for bedtime, Fox Went out on a chilly night, Before I went for walks And did not write;

You never mind the squalls and storms That are renewed long since; Outside, the thick snow swarms Into my prints

And swirls out by warehouses, sealed. Dark cowbarns, huddled. still. Beyond to the blank field, The fox's hill

Where he backtracks and sees the paw, Gnawed off. he cannot feel; Conceded to the jaw Of toothed, blue steel.

Not much is said outright. It is winter. A child is now three. She goes about her business talking, singing. Her father recalls walks that he has taken, other snows, and songs that she has forgotten or never knew. He also muses on her strangeness and the fact that the snow outside has obliterated his footsteps. Though the metre is primarily iambic, it is also varied; while the lines may run into each other, or run over from stanza to stanza. each stanza moves quietly to its focus on the speaker, the poet. For it is

his daughter. The landscape is that of his separation-cold, dark, closed. The theme is estrangement in this winter of storming parents, though the child seems oblivious to their strife. The tone is wry. Like the fox in the song she has forgotten, he too has gone out on many a chilly night; like the fox he also sees his impression vanish in the storm; and like the fox he has left part of him-· self-his daughter-to the trap he has evaded. He has also paused to note his loss.

This is one of a cycle of poems that show Snodgrass at his best. The "Heart's Needle" pieces, ten in number, one for each season in a period of two and a half years, begin with the winter of 1952 and end with spring, 195�. All but the ninth were written at Iowa. Looking backward, we may be reminded of such painful Victorian revelations as Meredith's Modern Love or Rossetti's The Hoose of Life; we certainly are not reminded of the equally Victorian platitudes of Coventry Patmore's The Angel in the House. The theme of divorce is, if anything, modern. The pain it creates is ancient: the title is taken from the phrase "an only daughter is the needle of the heart" in an old Irish story. And for the future, the myth of the artist, the great subject of modern literature, is made even more harrowing. The artist is now estranged where once the world had no power. Nor can he further disengage himself. His daughter is partly himself. She is his torment and his solace. Apart from her he is lost, yet his art may be quickened. The honesty, delicacy, and understatement that Snodgrass employs to construct this dilemma are masterful. He could so easily have fallen into the pitfalls of sensationalism or sentimentality. But he does not.

Throughout these poems the now familiar images of No Man's land, a city park, the rolling countryside, and a long parade of grotesque animals, dead and alive, help us keep our bearings. The first poem starts much as did the fifth already mentioned. Cynthia, the poet's daughter, born during the Korean War, is also the child of his winter, his own marital cold war. Thus he may see into his child's mind with the eyes of a "chilled tenant-farmer" gazing on his fields covered with unmarked snow:

Here lies my land

Unmarked by agony, the lean foot Of the weasel tracking. the thick trapper's boot; And I have planned

My chances to restrain The torments of demented summer or Increase the deepening harvest here before It snows again.

The second poem moves through spring towards that "demented summer" which the poet had hoped to restrain after the stealthy winter nostilities. In three sestets we are asked to consider a three-year-old's garden and, indirectly, the girl herself, sprout of another garden bed:

Someone will have to weed and spread

The young sprouts. Sprinkle them in the hour

When shadow falls across their bed.

You should try to look at them every day

Because when they come to full flower

I will be away.

The fatal summer arrives in the third poem. It opens with a child swung between its parents, who are momentarily pulled together and then move apart. The tug of the poem is the pull on the child. Her parents, now separated, are likened to Korean War prisoners returned after a settlement:

And nobody seems very pleased. It's best. Still, what must not be seized Clenches the empty fist.

I tugged your hand, once, when I hated Thinas less: a mere game dislocated

The radius of your wrist.

With fall present, Snodgrass and daughter take a walk in the fourth poem. They snip flowers in a municipal park, blow dandelions, and pocket late buds that they may still bloom despite the recent frost. His hopes remain for his daughter's life in spite of the separation. These hopes also commingle with his fears for the halted scrawl of his own unfinished verses brought home to him by a glimpse of broken morning glories. The last stanza brings the seasonal coda for poet, father, and daughter. Keeping close to a basic syllabic pattern of 6,6,6,8,4 and a rhyme scheme of ababb, this stanza, like the rest, allows the last two lines to put enormous pressure on the flattened suggestion of the first three:

Night comes and the stiff dew.

I'm told a friend's child cried because a cricket, who had minstreled every night outside her window, died.

The remaining five poems are just as wryly involved in grief and the seasons' flow. The last two in particular take us through two of Iowa City's most respected chambers of horrors, also the panorama of Snodgrass' domestic life. In the first, the poet whiles away the time in the thirdfloor museum of the old library. There, stuffed and resigned, his blessings confront him: two snarling bobcats, a bison confronting its calf, a lioness protecting her cub, two elk locked in mutual hate. Or, respectively, spatting daughter

Spring, 1960

and step-daughter, the poet correcting his child, the envious first wife, she and the poet caught in the old rancor. The final poem, however, discovers father and daughter once again in the park up to their old tricks: roasting hotdogs on old hangers, paying their respects to the animals now beginning their spring rites. Remarried, the poet has survived and suffered, and spring has come again, and so his life must go, the cycle conclude and renew:

If I loved you, they said, I'd leave and find my own affairs.

Well, once again this April, we've come around to the bears;

punished and cared for, behind bars, the coons on bread and water stretch thin black fingers after ours. And you are still my daughter.

If nothing more, it is the conclusiveness of Snodgrass' last lines that is so arresting. But perhaps this is enough of crude description. The poet's own words may best explain this new excellence. These form the conclusion of his recent essay towards an explanation of "Heart's Needle, 6" in the Partisan Review, spring 1959:

I am left, then, with a very old-fashioned measure of a poem's worth-the depth of its sincerity. And it seems to me that the poets of our generationthose of us who have gone so far in criticism and analysis that we cannot ever turn back and be innocent again, who have such extensive resources for disguising ourselves from ourselves-that our only hope as artists is to continually ask ourselves, "Am I writing what I really think'? Not what is acceptable; not what my favorite intellectual would think in this situation; not what I wish I felt. Only what I cannot help thinking." For I believe that the only reality which a man can ever surely know is that self he cannot help being, though he will only know that self through its interactions with the world around it. If he pretties it up, if he changes its meaning, if he gives it the voice of any borrowed authority, if in short he rejects this reality, his mind will be less than alive. So will his words.

Anything I might add to this would be an anticlimax. So here it is. I am left with the question of who in Iowa will read these poems aside from the teachers and poets? Frankly, I wish many others would, there and elsewhere. Take the typical cooed from Coon Rapids, who buys her pencils along with her massive social study texts in Gordon's Book Store; who modeled last summer in a Des Moines department store; and who will be off next fall to New York to live with three other co-eds from South Dakota and Illinois, and then maybe wind up married in Scarsdale-she probably ought to read the book. So should some of the bright graduate students

in hydraulic engineering from Arabia. The same goes for the boys from those massive, uninsistent farms or from those hamlets that tick off the years by decades and have pre-war Rotary magazines in the dentist's office. Then I suppose I also worry about all these people partly because I still miss Iowa City and so often wonder how it's changed. Does the sun still boil the highway, Clabber Girl sign, and dusty green fields into a pollen-thick blue haze? Do the sleety April rains still turn the new housing projects into mud flats stared at by the nervous wife and kids of some new J.C. Penney junior executive just in from Missouri or Nebraska, or by some new university professor, his class pencil still in his hand? Are the parks just as tangled

and unkempt, the drinking fountains just as cracked? Do the poets still read their verses in the hall off the Amvet bar? Are the streets still so empty and solemn after midnight that you can hear a drunk shout from a speeding car from at least two blocks away? And how, by the way, is my old record at the Household Finance office? Have the Quonset huts fallen in? Do old men still sit on the hood of the first parked Ford available along Dubuque Street on Saturday mornings? Has the usual spring murder got itself committed yet? I wonder, but I am also somewhat consoled now. For Snodgrass' Heart's Needle, apart from its excellence and extraordinary literary promise, has brought all that old foolish life back to me.

Mr. Snodgrass kindly sent me the following poem to print with my essay. It was omitted from the American edition of Heart's Needle, but will probably be included in the forthcoming English edition. It was printed by the Transatlantic Review, and is here reprinted by permission.

Janice, the poet's wife, was born on a Fourth of July. Her name is pronounced to rhyme with peace. The bridge of the poem is the Crandic Bridge on the road to Cedar Rapids

Letter

In our bare feet we crossed the sopping lawn And touched huge maples splintered in the storm Of Independence Night, which is your birthday. Tonight I write where we first woke together; I sat today in grass where we had gone. Those ragged stubs where branches wrenched away Are old scars darkening with the Autumn weather. Beneath, the locust husks are golden, warm.

The little trolley bridge we tarried on And spit, or tried to, on the shining cars Beneath our feet - today I say, Janice, This traffic on its evening way. By wars And wars our world is growing toward its peace; The mind heavy with praise, though you are gone.

Christian Dennis Wunsch

Christian Dennis Wunsch lives in La Junta, Colorado, where he was born and went to school. At Northwestern he is a senior in the College of Liberal Arts, majoring in English and at the same time meeting pre-medical requirements. He is a member of Beta Theta Pi, and Northwestern Wrestling Team. In 1959 he received the Edwin L. Shuman Award for excellence in writing.

The line drawing is by Marilynn Lucille Smith, graduate of the Art Institute, and an artist for Time magazine.

THE END OF THE RAINBOW

IWENT DOWN TO THE BEACH TODAY and you know what I saw? I saw this guy and his girl and their little baby boy. I watched them play with their little boy and I wondered if I would ever be a father. Right then it really seemed remote to me, getting married, sitting on the beach with your kid and all. But I suppose that someday I'll get married and have a son, and it won't seem so remote, and probably not at all like I think it is now. Like being a senior in high school, probably that's what it'll be like. I'm one now. I remember when I used to look at those big guys in the senior class and think that someday I'd be like that, but it's not that way. I get to thinking that guys today aren't as big as they used to be in high school, that the football players were bigger and rougher, but when I mention it to someone they say to compare football programs of the past years and see if the guys in our class aren't the same size. Maybe so, and maybe time changes people fast enough so that our class isn't the way the seniors used to be. Well, this is all kinda round about from talking about marriage, but I just know that when I get married it won't be at all the way it looks now. Someday I'll have a son but I won't have the father-son relationship that I think that guy and his baby son are having. I guess it is possible that a father's relation with his son just looks different to the young guys but in reality it will be the same. Maybe I'll be the same kind of �ather as mine was. My dad and I didn't have too close of a relation because I was pretty young and all when he died,

Spring, 1960

and I guess it's pretty hard to have a good friendship with your father when you're still pretty young. Probably the most I ever saw of my dad, I mean really saw, because before I never noticed much, was when we went on this fishing trip. I guess I was about ten then, and it was my first fishing trip. Oh, I went on fishing trips before but my folks would leave me with his parents in a little town where they lived and then go on to fish about fifty miles away. It sure was boring there but every year on the weekend my grandparents would take me down to the place where my folks were fishing. That wasn't any fun either because they said I wasn't old enough to fish and that I'd probably drown in the river if I went fishing. But in that year when I was about ten, Dad said that I was old enough to fish and ought to learn how. He thought that every boy ought to learn how to fish.

I never could see why fishing was so important to him, but I'll tell you how much he liked to fish. When he'd go hunting in the fall for pheasants, and ducks, and geese, or whenever we slaughtered chickens-I forgot to mention, we lived on a farm-no matter what bird my dad killed, you know what he'd do? He'd cut out a patch of hide and feathers off their neck and pull some feathers out of their wings and save them for flies. He used the neck hackles to make wet flies and the wing hackles to make the dry ones. He wasn't very orthodox about using just one kind or the other like most good fishermen are. He said he used the kind that got the most fish. His fly-tying equip-

ment was very crude and it took him a long time to make flies, but they were really pretty when he finished.

Something else I remembered, too. In the fall when the weeds and all turned brown after the first frost and then dried out, my father would go out and prune back the bamboo that grew along the side of the house. He saved some of the shafts of bamboo and made himself fly rods out of it. Boy, it would take him hours to work a shaft of it down, and sand it, and varnish it. Then he'd put on the guides that he had made out of the wire we used to tie up the seed sacks with. When he got through he had a beautiful eight and a half foot, three-piece rod. He said that his rod only weighed about five ounces and that one like it would cost around eighty dollars in the store. Now you can tell how much he thought about fishing.

Well anyway, we went fishing that year, and I was really excited about it all. We left at about five o'clock in the morning because Dad said he wanted to get in some fishing that day. The road was rutty and our old car didn't have any shock absorbers on it worth a damn so it was bouncy all the way. When we got there, though, things started to go wrong. We went to unpack the trunk and there was this beer all over everything. Dad loved beer and he brought this stuff with him, except it was too green when he bottled it, and it worked up all the gas in the bottles going over the bumpy road. I guess when one of them went they all went because there wasn't a bottle left in the bunch. Everything smelled like beer for a whole week.

When we finally got unpacked Dad fixed up one of his old rods and showed me how to cast, then we took off up the river. We walked a long way and finally found a place where we could get down to the river. The Rio Grande is a hell of a big river, and the brush and willows are so thick that you can't get down to it just whenever you want. On the way down to it Dad got the tip of his rod caught in one of the willows and the tip broke. Boy, I'll never forget that. He really got mad because he knew he'd have to walk all the way back to the cabin to get another one. I'll bet he wore out five languages swearing before he cooled off. He told me to fish where we were and wait till he got back. He left and I waded into the river very carefully. The river was a little wider and slower where I was so it wasn't too dangerous. I waded out a little way and started to cast. On my first cast I didn't have out very much line because I couldn't handle very much yet, and I cast rather clumsily I guess. I watched the flies drift back towards me, and I was sure some fish would

strike, but none did. Boy, I was tense as hell and I cast again. I was watching my flies and all of the sudden I saw a fish start for one. It scared me and I jerked the fly he was going for right out of his mouth, then stood there just tense as hell. I kept telling myself to relax and be cool-headed. I cast a couple more times and started to relax when another fish came up and hit one of my flies. I froze this·time; I didn't even set the hook, but this one hung himself. He started out for the middle of the river tugging like mad and I just froze there. Some times my line went slack, other times it got too taut. Instead of keeping steady pressure on it like a good fisherman would, I just froze. I finally came around to thinking that I had to pull him in if I was ever going to get him, and I started reeling. My heart was pounding, and the fish was jumping and fighting, and that little fly rod was bent almost double. I wasn't very good at co-ordinating my rod and net, and the fish sure as hell wasn't co-operating. Every time I got the net close to him he'd take off and fight some more, but when he was finally so tired that he couldn't fight I got the net under him. It must have taken about ten minutes to land him. That was just half the battle, though. Every time I started to stick my hand in the net he'd start fighting again and twist the net up. It scared me, it really did. I was afraid to take ahold of him. Somehow I did, and I got the hook out and put him in my creel. By that time I was shaking like a leaf. The cold water was part of it, but even when I got out I couldn't stop shaking. I sat down on the bank and kept trembling. Every now and then I felt the fish hopping in my creel and once I opened it up and looked at him. He was laying there moving his jaws like he was gasping for air and staring at me. I wished that he had eyelids and would close them instead of staring at me, but he kept on looking until I had to shut the lid on my creel. I tried to quit thinking about him, but he kept moving, and each time he didn't move as hard as the time before. I know it sounds childish now, but I got to thinking that maybe he had a family somewhere, that all of his friends wouldn't ever see him again, but what I really thought about was how hard he fought against me. You know how your parents were when you twisted the eat's tail? They asked you how you would like it if they twisted your tail. Well, this wasn't a situation of how-would-you-like-it, but a situation of whatwould-you-do. I mean if you saw something lying on the sidewalk and you picked it up, and then this great big giant threw a rope around you and drug you to his cave and started to kill you, what would you do? You'd probably say, "Why?

Why is this happening to me?", or "Please, giant, don't kill me!" or else you'd sit there in fright and go half-crazy, that's what you'd do. This fish didn't do that, though. He fought me, that's what he did. He didn't ask why, or plead with me, or shake from fright; he fought me. After I thought a while I started crying, and I took the fish out of my .creel and threw him back into the river. He didn't swim away. He laid on his side and I saw his big white belly, the broad rainbow stripe on his side, and .his big open jaw as he floated away. I prayed then, I prayed that he wasn't dead, that he'd come alive and swim away, but he just kept floating on his side.

I sat on the bank for a long time and finally stopped crying. I thought of some chickens I had killed. I just picked them up by their legs, put them across the chopping block, and whack, off came their heads. Once I killed a sheep. I went out with Dad. He handed me the gun and showed me where to shoot her in the head. Pow! She was dead and it didn't even bother me. I still couldn't get over being so shook about this fish.

Dad came back from the cabin about that time and asked me if I had any luck. I told him I caught one and threw him back. He asked me what the hell I did a foolish thing like that for and I couldn't answer him. I just couldn't say anything. For some reason I just couldn't say why. I guess I must have started to cry again and Dad figured that he'd said something or another. He wasn't mad any more and he sat down beside me and told me not to feel bad about anything he'd said, to cheer up because this was a trip to have fun on and all. He got up and said that he'd give me fifty cents if I could catch my limit and that if he couldn't catch his he'd give me a dollar. Since he was old enough to have to buy a license he could catch ten fish, but kids were just allowed to catch five. He got up and left then. I'll never forget it. There was this side of the mountain that the river had been cutting in to and the only way to get farther up the river was to climb it. Dad climbed right up it and walked on up the river. I tried to fish a little while longer, but I really didn't feel like fishing, so I figured that I'd go on up the river a ways and watch Dad Well, I started to climb up over the rocks, but I couldn't pick out a path to get to the top. I'd have broken my fool neck if I'd have tried it. I sat down on the bank again and started feeling lonely as hell. I decided to wade out in the river and maybe I could see Dad fish up around the bend. I got out far enough to where I could see around the willows and watched him. He was really something. He never wore waders or anything. When

Spring, 1960

he fished he just put on this old pair of boondockers and waded, clothes and all, right out into the cold river water. You don't have any idea how cold it was. You could still see the snow in the mountains. The river was swift and noisy where he was and he couldn't wade out more than waist deep and still stay on his feet. He'd move along upstream from willow to willow, hanging on for dear life with one hand and fishing with the other. I bet no one ever fished that spot before. He used to say, "It's not how good of a fisherman you are, it's all in being where the fish are, and if you don't believe me just go out to the rainbarrel and see how many you can catch." I saw him pullout two fish at one time. Bracing himself against the current, trying to keep his balance and catch those fish all at once was really something. He caught a glimpse of me downstream after he'd landed them and held them up for me to see. I don't think I ever saw a bigger smile in my whole life.

He fished a bit longer, until he caught his limit, then came on back down to meet me. We walked back to the cabin together and he told me about each fish, where he caught them and how. He cleaned his fish and brought them into the cabin. He said he was as hungry as a full grown Percheron after a long day's work and could eat twice as much. I think he almost did, too. Dad put on a great show whenever he ate the fish he caught. When he planned on eating fish for a meal he wouldn't eat much the meal before so he'd be hungry. He had to have his fish a certain way. He cleaned them but wouldn't scale them or let Mom cut off the tails or heads. "I want to know I'm eating fish," he'd say. Boy, the way he ate them. He'd pick them up by the tail, strip the meat off with his fork and tear the tail off when he was through. Then he'd wolf down the meat, all the little bones still stuck in it and eat the tail. Mom brought him seven fish that night.

We fished for a few more days and it turned out that I wasn't much of a fisherman, but I had a good time of it. I was sorry to go home when it finally came time to leave. All the way home Dad talked about how it was going to be next year when we went, and how he'd show me a few more tricks and all. I'll bet it would have been fun, too, except that next year never came for Dad. One day our hired hand came running and screaming into the house. Mom made me stay inside and I never did get the whole story from anyone until we were ready to sell the place and leave. Our hired hand told me about it. Dad had these two prize boars in one of our pens and he wanted to clean out the slop trough. He told

the hired hand to go fix one of the harnesses that was broken. When the hired hand came back he found Dad lying dead in the pen with the two boars tearing him apart with their long tusks. One of the boars had a big gash alongside his head where it looked like someone had kicked him and the other had a couple of ribs caved in. The thing the hired hand couldn't figure out was why Dad didn't holler for help or anything because he was right around the corner.

That seems a long way away now down here in Texas along the gulf where Mom's folks live and we stay. I guess it's about as far away as the

time when I'll have a boy of my own. I'd like to take him fishing where Dad and I fished, but the last I heard was that all of the willows and foliage along the Rio Grande up there in the mountains had died. There was something about a foreign type of cutworm that couldn't have got in there unless they were accidently or purposely carried in by a truck. When the willows and all died, so did the fish because there wasn't any insects or food left. I hear the only thing left in the river now that the game fish are dead are a few blockheaded, sluggish old suckers that live off the garbage and crap.

Richard John Smith

Richard John Smith, a Chicagoan, is twenty-three years old and a senior at the Chicago campus of Northwestern, majoring in History. His special interest is South Africa, where he hopes eventually to make his home. He has traveled in Canada, England, Australia, New Zealand, the Oceanic Isles, and in South Africa, which is the setting of the story below.

THE VALLEY OF A THOUSAND HILLS

THE CITY OF DURBAN in September of 1955 was sprawling over mountain tops and valleys. Glass and concrete were rising in the city's center, cranes came down and elevators loaded with steel, men, and mortar clanged up to the tops of big white mushrooms overlooking the Indian Ocean that came in cold and distant.

I was sitting down next to Mary at one of the city's outdoor cafes. She was English, born in South Africa and living in Johannesburg-Jo'burg as they called it-the largest city in the world that was not located near some body of water. She had come down to Durban on a holiday, and I had met her here and she stayed on.

I noticed that the bluff to the south was green; it had been lavender in the early morning. Stretching from it to us was the beach, narrow, and speckled with an orchard of umbrellas. Mary wasn't talking but when the Indian waiter came over she ordered her own beer. I think that even if we had conversed it would have been difficult because of the many cars rushing noisily down the Marine Parade and the many people around us, loquacious and loud-that wealthy Jewish Jo'burg crowd-always conscious of the vibrant social whirl. About thirty tables were facing the Indian Ocean; across the Parade was a row of white apartments and hotels.

"I guess we'll have to go to that party now."

"Oh, I don't want to go," she said.

A Zulu pulling his rickshaw toward us was wearing a spangled headress-a hovering pile ef feathers, horns, beads, and shells. It was rather commercial looking. He was prancing barefoot and laughing at the traffic.

"How would you like a ride in that, Mary?"

Spring, 1960

"Oh, I'd feel so stupid," she said, gazing in the direction to which my raised glass pointed.

"You know Jack is expecting us."

"Well, I'll let you enjoy his South African hospitality by yourself."

"I think you are being very unfair, Mary."

"If you can leave me for three weeks and go off to Rhodesia by yourself, then you can get along without me just fine."

"I go up there to keep my sanity."

"What am I, your insanity?"

I shouted to her through all the noise of people and waves and cars that we needed another drink.

After we finished it she was ready to go and we moved through the crowd of tables. We flagged a cab glittering toward us in the hot sunlight. The taxi skirted the blue Indian Ocean and brisk palm trees. We turned down the Esplanade facing the harbor. It was going to be a hot day. The sky was enormous and fiercely blue to the hill-topped horizon.

"Don't be difficult, Mary; you'll like Jack's place. It's way up on Berea."

"I suppose that he has to have at least one American at his party. Maybe you're the only one around. What does he want just another South African like me for?"

"Because he knows that you and I are always together."

"Well, that's more than I know."

I put my head back on the leather seat and laughed loudly. We headed down Russell Street with its facade of new flats-rising in terrific clatter-overlooking Albert Park. The car began to climb up Moore Road and down below you

could see the white buildings in the city center along the beach. To our left, as we gazed down on the avenue, were houses perched above a slope. Steep walks led up to their doors, passing through brick walls that bordered the sidewalk. In the backyard to the right were lemon trees and it was jacaranda time in Durban. Thousands of trees were choked with blue and purple blossoms. Up ahead a big house with an imposing yard had a trellis groaning with red roses. On the left again the steep yards above the brick wall were sometimes rock gardens ablaze with flowers creeping around the rocks. Children with golden hair and wearing blue uniforms walked across the street at an intersection. It reeked up here in Berea of overripe blossoms-a sugariness; it smelled like heaps of oranges in front of a grocery. The heat lifted the scent over to the concrete Toad and then into the car.

The cab finally stopped. I paid the m.an and we stepped out.

"Jack's house?" Mary asked. It was set up above the sidewalk and a steep wall; it was a peachcolored bungalow, smothered by laughing bushes, and stairs danced toward it. After we had walked up the steep steps, I knocked on the door. I heard wild peals of laughter inside; then a window in the door opened and a Jewish face presented itself.

"Yeah!"

"Hello, I'm Morris Rowe," I said.

"Hey, Jackbo," the face shouted, "it's Yankee Doodle Dandy! Come on in, man." The face became a plump musician, whose one hand held a trumpet, the other an incredibly large glass. He saw Mary behind me. "You from the States too?"

"Oh, no."

Jack came over from across the room that was filled with people sprawling over his large furniture and floors. "Hello, Morey-you gangster!

"Hello, Jack." He looked like the Duke of Edinburgh, a younger version perhaps. "Mary!" he said.

"Hello, Jack," she replied, smiling a little.

"Gangster, I want you to meet Benny Levine, the best trumpet player in Natal."

Benny nodded his flushed face and amost shouted, "Say, are you from New York City?"

"No, Chicago."

He pressed his fat fingers over my coat pocket, then turned to Jack and blubbered, "Man, he doesn't carry one."

"Hey," he shouted, "you going back to the States someday?"

"Maybe."

"Look up Mae for me, will you?"

"Mae?"

"You'll know her; she lives in New York City and has black hair-let's see, what kind of a purse does she carry?"

New York-somehow there came to me a picture, a city twinkling in the blue fog thousands and thousands of miles away. America was like that when you were far away from it. And you could see the whole map in your mind, and the cities on it were flashing green lights; you could have it all.

"Mae, yeah, she carries a brown purse."

Only a little sunlight came in from the large bay window crowded with onlookers. The great yellow petals of the bushes near the window were laughing at us. Somebody put a drink in my hand.

"Anybody in the back yard?" I said to Jack.

"Maybe. Want to go out?"

"Yes."

"Jack! Jack!" a big Australian holding a pitcher of iced gin and orange was shouting from across the room. "Lovely and cool, Jack. I'm enjoying this, Jack." He drank out of the pitcher.

Mary was sitting on the floor talking to Benny. We walked through the dining room filled with card players dealing over tables. The small back room was empty except for cases of bottled beer and spirits. When we stepped out the door, it was hot and clear and sunny. The yard made a little slope. The green grass came up to a bed of pink hollyhocks lying near the path and house. The whole city was below us. The white buildings of the heart of Durban and the beach area were gleaming white; the bay looked almost silver. We sat beneath a jacaranda tree, an enormous tree stuffed with blue and purple petals, stinking with the heat of blossoms. The wrought iron chairs placed under the tree and beside a white garden table were a welcome relief. Mary, who had followed us out, was lost in a trance, gazing at the great, silent, unmoving conurbation below.

An Indian in a white starched coat brought bottles and silver buckets of ice from the dining room. He poured our drinks into sparkling glasses. We sat, we drank, and we talked, and sometimes Jack or Benny would leave for the house and then return again. Each time the door opened we could hear the loud talking and shouting.

When the dusk began to fall, people would come out with glasses in their hands and look down at the city and bay below, that were like sheets of black crepe paper. Some careless creature had thrown a trayful of diamonds off the

mountain and they had rolled down the slope and settled in the city; they didn't reach the seu.

In a kind of haze we left the garden and the dark sweetness of the air and wandered into the rooms of the house that were swirling with voices, noises and figures.

"Home rule for Rhodesia and to hell with Britain!

"Shut up; you're British."

"I'm Rhodesian! God's own country."

"Rhodesia is the root of all evil; take it away, take it away, take it away."

"Bullshit!

"Say, who invited you here anyway?"

Tables and chairs gave way before the hurried scuffling. "I don't mind slavery as long as I'm not the slave."

"I prefer slavery to a multi-racial hotel."

"Benny, man, play something cool and crazy."

"My son thinks that every statue in South Africa is of Cecil Rhodes."

-Grab your hat and grab your coat; leave your worries on the doorstep--

"-and I told him, 'Don't hurt my daughter. Make sure you do come back from England. This is serious and she is sensitive.' And a month later I received this letter from his mother saying 'Due to the racial policies of the South African government, I don't think my son should associate-'

-and we will be-

"What has my daughter got to do with this country's racial policies?"

-as rich as RockefeHer-

"-and I said to her, 'never, never pinch the monkeys.'

"I'm not a South African. Why, these people don't even do their own shopping."

"My father sells machinery. Hell, I couldn't sell any machinery."

"I do my own shopping."

"No, you're wrong. Oppenheimer is all for the white man."

Some time later we said good-by. Benny was blowing a silver trumpet and black outlines danced closely to "Rock Around the Clock." But we left that and stepped out the door, stumbling down the steps to a waiting cab.

When we rolled back down the streets, everything was dizzy, and my mind became oppressive with its throbbing omnipresence. Mary was beside me; that wasn't any good. It would go on and on-that party. I pressed my forehead on the windowpane; the lights of the city as we descended lower and lower became larger. She was beside me always-weeping-drunk. Some party!

You can rise only within and not above those people back there. You can't go native; they only try to do that in America or Europe, and down here a city is sacred.

In Rhodesia we were half way up a mountain and I was below them; and I had begun to be afraid. They had gone away from the path and gone straight up through the forest. They had grasped the little trees in the slanting forest. I followed them, my hands holding trembling sprouts. When the leaves above me moved, the sky was let in and the hot midday sun burned patches on my face. On the floor of the slanting mountain forest were dried leaves, and I stamped through them. I was burdened because I carried a bottle of beer in my pocket. Up on the top were cold bottles under a rock and you did not bring yours to drink, but to replace. Then the ground became slippery, and I had to make it to that large rock lying settled in strange and lonely security. Grasp that tree there! Make it over to that slanting rock! Quick, hold onto it-tight! Panting hot with life, I lay firmly atop my promontory. Above me in the forest, they were crunching leaves-climbing-waving black bottles. A weight released itself from my body and far below was a caustic sound of glass over rock. Then the leaves of the forest gave way, the trees descending from slopes, and the burning plain of Africa, the hottest yellow midday ever set aflame, spread to the blue hills of Mozambique.

No, there's nothing dark about this continent. That's why you never leave, except to go back and forth between its cities and the bush. To and fro, ascending and descending. There are places you escape to, and somehow you hope that beyond the suffocating love for your own race you may find the primitive, the pure, and the light, that is only breathed in that heaven you can never see.

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Aesthetic shifts, decade to decade, take place in the liking for Shakespeare's plays. Measure for Measure, with its one-half of briUiance, and Troilus and Cressida, with its hard intellectuality and its modern disiHusionment, have recently "come up," especially among collegians. Even Timon of the long outof-fashion Timon of Athens has, for his wrath, his cult among the seminars and advanced-study groups. Perhaps of the once neglected plays, Coriolanus, most austere of the Roman tragedies, has risen highest. This year at Northwestern University alone it will be studied in three major classes and be read by over fifteen hundred students.

Responsible for this admiration is a kind of formal symmetry now discerned in Coriolanus - an artistically exciting structure which, like a well conceived statue, can be examined from many sides.

The editor of THE TRI-QUARTERLY has invited seven men of considerably differing interests to examine some of the facets of the play and its subject matter.

Professor Carl A. Roebuck, Chairman of the Classics Department, leads off this brief symposium with a discussion of the historicity of the Coriolanus of fact or legend. Stuart G. P. Small, Associate Professor in the same department, continues with the Coriolanus of Plutarch's Lives, Shakespeare's source for the play. Lacy B. Smith, Associate Professor of History, considers the play in its relation to the Tudor concept of the state. Other political aspects of the situation which Shakespeare depicts are discussed by Professor Richard C. Snyder, Chairman of the Political Science Department. Professor Frank W. Fetter of the Economics Department, takes a not wholly satisfied look at the economic problem with which Shakespeare begins the play only to let it drop. Professor Robert I. Watson of the Psychology Department (and a member of the medical faculty) probes into both Coriolanus and Shakespeare through the fatal and preFreudian mother-son relationship. Moody E. Prior, Professor of English and Dean of the Graduate School, closes the series with an analysis of Coriolanus as tragic hero.

CORIOLANUS: A SYMPOSIUM OF SEVEN

Coriolanus: The Story-

Carl A. Roebuck

The deeds of Coriolanus

Should not be uttered feebly. It is held That valor is the chiefest virtue, and Most dignifies the haver. If it be, The man I speak of cannot in the world

Be singly counterpoised.

T

HE TRADITIONAL STORY of Gaius Marcius

Coriolanus, the arrogant and unyielding Roman patrician, is set in the early years of the fifth century before Christ, shortly after the Roman nobility had expelled their Tarquin kings and established a republican form of government. According to tradition, the young republic was beset externally by attacks from the fierce hill tribes of central Italy, among them the Volscians, and

internally by a struggle between the governing class of patrician landowners and the plebeian farmers and craftsmen. The plebeians devised an effective method of forcing concessions by calling a general walkout from the city, which impaired the ability of Rome to make war. Very soon they compelled the patricians to acquiesce in the creation of plebeian officials, the tribunes, whose function it was to protect the ordinary people from patrician oppression. Rome suffered, too, from the growing pains of an increasing population and an inadequate grain supply, for its limited territory was under constant attack by the hill people. In the wars against the Volscians Coriolanus won his military reputation and in the political and economic crisis of the state set himself against the plebeians.

His story was a popular tale in Roman antiq-

uitv, told by several authors. Shakespeare used only Plutarch's Life of Coriolanus, translated by Sir Thomas North, which is the most developed and dramatic. Livy, the historian of the Roman Republic, wove some episodes into his account of early Rome (ii. 34-40), and a highly colored and rhetorical version was given by Dionysius of Halicarnassus in his Roman Antiquities (vi. 92-94; vii. 20-27; viii. 1-60). Just as Shakespeare varied his incident and emphasis from Plutarch, to serve his own dramatic purpose, so there are differences among these accounts written in antiquity. We may assume that the story of Coriolanus had been expanded and embellished as it was told and retold from the time of its alleged occurrence about 500 B.C. until the composition of the versions we possess, five and six hundred years later. Yet, in all the accounts the framework is essential1y similar, which may indicate that we do have an old legend reflecting the early struggles of Rome, even if its details serve the ends of fiction, not of history.

Gaius Marcius was born into a prominent patrician family and won his surname, Coriolanus, from his valor in the capture of the town, Corioli, from the Volscians led by Attius Tullus Aufidius. The proper reward for such service to the state was election to Rome's highest office, the consulate, but Coriolanus had a reputation for harsh obduracy against the plebeians as well as for his military exploits. According to Plutarch he was rejected by them at the election, which so incensed Coriolanus that he bitterly opposed making a distribution of grain to the people in time of famine and even went so far as to propose using the famine as a lever to abolish the new office of the tribunate. All the ancient accounts make his quarrel with the people turn directly on this point and not on the rejection for the consulate. Shakespeare, of course, has emphasized the political, rather than the economic motivation and has also developed the role of Coriolanus' mother and that of Menenius, the patrician, as intercessors in the interest of Roman unity. When the tribunes wished to impeach Coriolanus for this hostility to the people, rather than for aiming at a tyranny, as in Shakespeare, he turned the occasion into a fierce indictment of tribunes and people and was forced into exile. He took refuge with the Volscian leader, Aufidius, and with him devised a scheme to provoke an incident between Rome and the Volscians which would anger the latter into making war on Rome. In the war Coriolanus' leadership and courage brought the Volscians to the walls of Rome where they proceeded to devastate the farms of the plebeians

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and left those of the patricians untouched. The plebeians, hoist by their own petard, prevailed on the patricians to sue for peace, and successive delegations were sent to the Volscians. Coriolanus rejected the pleas both of his patrician friends and of the priests of Rome, and only yielded to the entreaties of his mother, Volumnia, who came as a last resort with the women of Rome. Plutarch, followed by Shakespeare, tells the story of Coriolanus' death at the hands of conspirators, acting under Aufidius' direction, when he was about to defend himself before the Volscians. According to the earliest version of Coriolanus' end, however, he lived to a ripe, comfortable, and most undramatic old age.

Modern scholarship has usually rejected the story as unhistorical, although a few argue that its outline may represent actual occurrence-at least, it could have happened. Aside from the variations of incident and detail in its several versions, which imply an uncertain tradition growing by embellishment and dramatic interest, there are historical anomalies which make it difficult to accept. The fulcrums on which the action turns, the power of the tribunes and the distribution of grain, belong more properly to the period of the Gracchan revolution in the late second century before Christ than to early Rome. At this time the history of early Rome was being written by a group of chroniclers called the Annalists, who provided the material used by Livy, Dionysius, and Plutarch. Since the Annalists found little but dry annual records of magistrates and the like with which to work, they motivated events by the concerns of their own period and embellished them by detail drawn from biographies of famous Greeks. For example, the story of Coriolanus' refuge with Aufidius is modelled in detail on that of Themistocles of Athens, who fled to a king of the Molossians. Other anomalies, too, are disturbing, to say the least. The practice of bestowing surnames for valor, Coriolanus from Corioli, is not attested elsewhere before the third century. Corioli was not a Volscian town and, from other sources, Rome is not known even to have been at war with the Volscians at the time of the alleged capture of Corioli.

What, then, are we to make of the story? The most eminent historian of Republican Rome, Theodore Mommsen, rejects it in toto as an invention of the Annalists. Others, more kindly disposed to Roman historiography, suggest that it is an old legend reflecting a period when Rome really did suffer from famine and Volscian raids. Its detail is probably beyond rescue as history, and historians will forgive Shakespeare for exer-

cismg his own mythopoetic fancy after the precedent of those writers who had told it earlier.

Plutarch's Life of CoriolanusStuart G.

B. Small

PLUTARCH

(about A.D. 46-120) WAS BORN in the small town of Chaeronea in Boeotia and spent most of his long life there, although he did find time to visit Rome occasionally and also journeyed to Alexandria and Asia Minor and various parts of Greece and Italy. Late in life he held office in the government of his native town. He was also a member for many years of the college of priests at Delphi, the site of Apollo's ancient oracular shrine, and had been initiated into the mysteries of Dionysus.

He must have spent most of his quiet and uneventful life in writing, for he is one of the most voluminous of classical authors: the latest edition of his surviving works (in the "Loeb Classical Library") is expected to fill twenty-five volumes. The range of his subject matter is vast, including among other things archaeology, literature, education, philosophy, religion, psychology, astronomy, and anthropology; but despite the great variety of the topics he touches on, his basic point of view remains essentially the same: it is that of the moralist, intent, in Montaigne's phrase, upon raising dunces out of the dirt, or to put it less succinctly, upon offering the reader advice as to how life is to be lived in an era when faith in the traditional religion, and even in the classical philosophies, was crumbling away into doubt, bewilderment, and despair.

His Parallel Lives, of which the life of Gaius Marcius Coriolanus is one, is undoubtedly his most famous work. The lives are not primarily history; that is, they are not intended to relate the continuous narrative of political and military events. Nor are they, paradoxically, biography, at least as the term is understood today: for they are not so much a presentation of the ways in which individuals represent and influence their age, as an attempt to exemplify, in the lives of men of action, certain universal and recurrent moral qualities, both good and bad. Plutarch's particular object is to convey to the reader a sense of his subject's greatness, and also an awareness of some of the faults that were intertwined with his particular form of greatness. Whatever is incompatible with this object is deliberately omitted.

He justifies this technique in a celebrated passage at the beginning of the life of Alexander

the Great, in which he says that the most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest manifestations of virtue and vice in men. Sometimes, he points out, a turn of phrase or a characteristic pleasantry tells us more about character and inclination than long stories of sieges and battles. For this reason Plutarch often puts aside politics and the fortunes of empires in order to dwell instead on what he calls the "marks and indications of the souls of men."

In the life of Coriolanus the author's basic strategy is to divide up the "marks and indications of the soul" into good points and bad points, with a view to casting up the accounts and arriving at a final score. The good points, in the present instance, are rather obvious and uninteresting examples of archaic virtus; they are just the qualities one would expect to find attributed to a hero of the Roman Republic. Coriolanus was simple and straightforward; he was a model of incorruptibility; his personal life was rigorously ascetic. In battle he showed extraordinary physical courage; his generalship, both when he was fighting for Rome and against her, was skillful and foresighted. His greatest positive achievement was the taking of Corioli, the principal city of the Volscians, by a surprise attack; this victory earned him the honorary surname of Coriolanus. His faults, as is so often the case, are more interesting than his virtues. They are also more psychologically complex; but they are hardly such as to endear him to the reader's heart, or indeed to any human being. He was constitutionally incapable of making his great actions and noble qualities acceptable to those whom he benefited. Through fear of being thought weak and of appearing to curry favor he behaved with intolerable pride and haughtiness toward his fellowcitizens, especially the plebeians. Such a personality is hardly a political asset in a republic; and in Coriolanus' case it led directly to his defeat in an election for the consulship, a post to which he was fully entitled on the basis of his great services to the state. Though he had professed no ambition for high office and had declined to ask for it as' a favor, he nevertheless felt great inward pain and indignation when the people rejected his candidacy. Coriolanus' wounded feelings on this occasion furnish curious proof of his consuming thirst for preeminence.

In Plutarch's view this defeat marks a turning point in his career. Emboldened by his failure in the consular election, his enemies, the demagogic tribunes of the people, determined to get rid of him once and for all by trumping up a charge that he had attempted to annul the priv-

ileges of tne plebeians and establish a senatorial autocracy. The same pride which had kept him from campaigning effectively for the consulship now prevented him from making an adequate defense against the clever tribunes; they carried their point with the people, and Coriolanus was obliged to go into exile.

From this point forward the major motive force behind all his actions was resentment. Thirsting for vengeance, he led his old enemies the Volscians against Rome, and gained many victories. Like a second Achilles he harshly repelled the embassies of his fellow-citizens who begged him to have mercy on his native land. He seemed nihilistically determined to destroy and overthrow Rome. But when his mother Volumnia, to whom he was intensely devoted, appeared before him as a suppliant, he relented and spared the city for her sake. This, the sole instance of a forbearing and yielding action in the life of the inflexible hero, was, as Plutarch says, a "grace ungracious," a favor that was not a favor; for to concede all as a favor to Volumnia was "less an honor to her than a dishonor to his city." In any event, the action roused the suspicions of his Volscian friends, and soon afterward Coriolanus was murdered.

What went wrong? Why was he unable to yield and accommodate his humors and sentiments to those of the people about him, incapable of acting and associating with others? Plutarch has a ready answer to this question, an answer which, as is so often the case in Plutarch, quietly disposes of the problem without disturbing or disquieting the reader's mind. The trouble, he says, goes back to the hero's early years. Coriolanus lost his father in childhood; therefore his upbringing was faulty and his education defective. If he had had the benefit of the civilizing and humanizing influence of the Muses, he might have been made to submit to the limitations prescribed by reason, thus avoiding the wildness of extremes. This is a soothing solution and one flattering to the liberal arts, but it will not satisfy all readers. Perhaps it does more to illuminate the personality of Plutarch than it does to explain the bedevilled and tormented Coriolanus.

Coriolanus and the State-

Lacy B. Smith

IT HAS OFTEN BEEN NOTED that it is difficult to discover in Shakespeare's plays any direct reference to the momentous events of his age such as the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, the

Spring, 1960

Armada, or the Reformation. On the other hand, it is a favorite pastime of some authors to argue that the plays are political manifestoes in disguise, and that Coriolanus, for instance, is really a defense of James I in his chronic bickering with his rebellious and unruly parliaments. Though it is impossible to prove that Shakespeare ever had Elizabethan or Jacobean politics in' mind, it is nevertheless important to point out that all of his history plays are in fact contemporary plays. Shakespeare had almost no conception of history. History was merely contemporary events taking place in the past, and the past was regarded as being in no way essentially different from the present. The historical aspects of his plays are accidental; you can learn nothing about fifth century B.C. Rome from Coriolanus, but the drama is a gold mine of information about Elizabethan England. It is, of course, true that Shakespeare will tell you little about parliament, the fate of the earl of Essex or the personality of Gloriana, but he will present something far more important to the historianthe conditions, the standards, and the mental attitudes under which these events and personalities operated.

In most of Shakespeare's histories and some of his tragedies there is a recurrent theme which is central to the sixteenth century and is universal to man in society regardless of time or geography. This is the question or series of interrelated questions about the nature of the state. What is the perfect state? Wherein does its perfection lie? What is man's role in the state? Is the state sacrosanct? If so, how do we explain or justify the successful revolution; if not, where can society find any enduring order, justice, stability, or standard other than force which creates its own "right--or rather, right and wrong." Tudor England trumpeted from every pulpit and forum its concept of the state-an organic and corporate organism grounded upon a due regard for order and degree. No Elizabethan was "born only for himself but for his country also." The modern tenet that the state is a human contrivance organized for the material well-being of man was unknown to the sixteenth century, which still believed that men were born into a divinely ordained society with certain established privileges and duties. The Tudor view of the state was organic and the favorite analogy was to the beehive, the human body or other forms of animal and vegetable life. In CorioLanus the analogy is to the human body. The body politic has a life of its own, and every member of the body has prescribed functions and is dependent

upon every other element of the organism. In Richard II the comparison is to the garden in which all plants are "trimmed and dress'd" that "look too lofty in our commonwealth." Order, degree and balance, these are the secrets of a wellordered realm, for, as Bishop Bonner remarked, "in matters of state, individuals were not to be so much regarded as the whole body of the citizens.

Coriolanus is the story of what happens when "law and form and due proportion" no longer operate and the individual fails to fulfill his proper function within the commonwealth. As the representative of the "better part," Coriolanus sets himself 'above the "more part" of society. This is right and just, for the vulgar, "manyheaded multitude" must have leadership, and quality must always take precedence over mere quantity. But Coriolanus' insatiable pride leads him to presume that he is superior not only to the masses but to the state itself. He refuses to accept subservience to the whole, and he dismisses the ancient custom of appearing before the people and acknowledging their just weight within society. (Weight is a more apt word than voice since the latter has democratic overtones which Shakespeare's generation would never have sanctioned.) In the end Coriolanus destroys himself because he refuses to recognize that others have rights (and duties) enshrined in history. It is as though the heart refused to recognize its dependence upon and the importance of the other organs of the body. In doing this it kills itself and the entire organism.

The case of Coriolanus is similar to that of Richard II. All rights and privileges in the sixteenth century were ascribed to divine inspiration, and Richard in denying the rights of Hereford to inherit his father's lands in fact denies his own divine right of kings. When this happens the state is no longer sacrosanct; it has ceased to be organic at the moment when one rebellious organ of society usurps the function or fails to recognize the rights of another member. Richard had become landlord of England, not king. Coriolanus committed the same crime; by refusing to acknowledge the rights of even those of inferior degree, he destroyed his own position as the natural and rightful leader of the state.

The fate of Coriolanus has nothing directly to do with Elizabeth, Essex, James, or James's parliaments; but the play does reveal the intellectual atmosphere in which the events of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries took place. With Shakespeare's help we can comprehend something that the great playwright himself

never fully appreciated-that the problems of the past may be similar to those of the present, but Shakespeare's answers need not be those of the twentieth century. For the Tudor age thought in other terms; its frame of reference, and its view of society and of the state were quite different from our own.

Coriolanus: A Political Jliew -

Richard C. Snyder

As A POLITICAL SCIENTIST,

rather than as a qualified student of Shakespeare, I find Plutarch's original story of Coriolanus a tastier morsel for political analysis than the play. The playwright's omissions and alterations seem to convert an intriguing study of the interrelations of leadership, institutional instability, immediate crisis, and social change, into a drama which often verges on farce. However, both the story and the play can be read profitably in the light of problems and developments in certain areas of the contemporary world. It is tempting to ask what elements, if any, in Shakespeare's own political ideology influenced his modifications of Plutarch's version of this episode in Roman history. But to avoid doing either his ideology or his craftsmanship an injustice, I shall accept the drama at face value-as if it all really happened that way.

Systematic analysis of the nature and effectiveness of leadership is a relatively recent phenomenon, though intuitive concern over political leadership is age-old. Coriolanus' behavior during his brief excursion into politics is highly significant quite apart from any light it casts on his personality. Apparently he found it impossible or inadvisable to establish rapport with his constituents and even his fellow governors. His public appearances were few and clearly frustrating for everyone. He presented an austere, almost one-dimensional, external self to those whose support he needed and who were eager to follow him. Assuming there are two important components in the leader-follower relationship, the affective (or feeling) component, and the official role component (reciprocal obligations and responsibilities), we may say that Coriolanus blundered miserably on both counts. He rebuffed admiration and gratitude for his personal military exploits. He insisted that his 'official role was to be defined solely by him, and he openly stated that the people who had to live by his decisions were too stupid to understand what a consul had to do or why. While a leader can afford to be careless or

ineffectual with respect to one of these components, to fail in each case is fatal. In sum, Coriolanus could not be the living political symbol of Rome because the populace found it impossible to identify themselves with him in any meaningful, satisfying sense. As he lacked the capacity to dramatize himself or issues in the manner of the statesman, so he also lacked the capacity of the successful politician to cultivate grass roots contacts. One of the lessons might be: the people want leaders to be "different" and somewhat "distant," yet not too much so, and leaders must have the feet of clay of all mortals without being handicapped by them.

Having had only limited political experience, the people and their tribunes lacked the ability to distinguish between a leader's politically relevant capacities and his non-relevant personal characteristics. Furthermore, among the tribunes and particularly the senators, there was apparently none willing to help create an indirect image of Coriolanus as an acceptable leader.

Even simpler governmental systems require the "art of politics" and attention to management. One is struck by the almost total absence of political skills in this sequence of events. Coriolanus' enemy, Aufidius, is a clever opportunist, but only Menenius, Coriolanus' intimate friend and admirer, bore any semblance to the kind of mediator, trouble-shooter and astute observer who is so necessary to facilitate the political process. Menenius' skills were inadequate. Furthermore, he was unable to separate his loyalty to Coriolanus from the performance of his advisory function. It was as though a Harry Hopkins became such a fan of an FDR that he lost his acumen and quiet effectiveness. Nor are the two tribunes, Sicinius and Brutus, able to control completely their manipulations of the people's attitudes and actions. With no one having foresight and the gift of legitimate compromise, the system produced an end result no one really wanted. Political skill consists in part of identifying and exploring the limits beyond which lie serious breakdowns and unwanted consequences.

To the lack of political skills must be added the factor of institutional transition. Power relationships between the common man and the patricians, and between the tribunes and the senators, were changing. Expectations and roles were less clear than they had been before concessions were made to the plebeians by the ruling group as a response to economic unrest. During the- period of uncertainty, the tribunes pushed toward maximum use of whatever new discretion had been granted and the senators acted hesitantly

and without protest. Meanwhile, the actual operations of the state-particularly the military ones -were in the hands of the elite. This constituted an almost classic prescription for instability: a marked discrepancy between power and responsibility.

If we may draw a lesson from the situation which Shakespeare depicted in his play, it would appear to be this: no political system can be internally effective and maintain itself against outside attack in the absence of a minimal consensus on matters of fundamental importance. Two bases of consensus are (1) agreed procedures for making choices and administering the government and (2) agreed goals of political action. Shakespeare's Romans were not, apparently, dedicated to clearly understood common goals, nor were they committed to certain operating principles such as the "agreement to disagree." Hence there was no consensus to circumscribe factional splits and no effective mechanism for mobilizing a new consensus. Coriolanus bitterly highlighted the lack of consensus-ironically enough when he made his short, abortive campaign for office-and his banishment from Rome demonstrated that power could be captured temporarily by inept individuals and the persistence of one element in the power structure, all without ample opportunity for exploring alternatives.

At the end, everyone seems to be standing around wondering how it all could have happened. The way it happened was as revealing of the absence of conditions of stable government as was the final scene itself. Rome was undergoing political transition. If the behavior of a single individual helped to trigger an institutional debacle, the very conditions under which it could occur were augurs of a Rome which, in fact and in history, developed to a high degree a consensus on both the aims and procedures of government.

What Does Coriolanus

Tell the Economists?-

Frank W. Fetter

LONG BEFORE FREUD, playwrights, like many other persons, sensed that men's actions sometimes were determined by memories and emotions buried deep in their minds and of which they were not themselves aware. And in the same way, long before Adam Smith and Karl Marx the idea found expression in great literature that economic problems were important and the

Spring, 1960

economic forces might influence the course of history. Hence, it is tempting for an economist, as for any specialist, to examine a classic work from his own interests and prejudices. This has its usefulness if one keeps a sense of perspective, but could easily lead to such absurdities as trying to appraise the understanding that Shakespeare's characters showed of the Keynesian consumption function or of deficit finance as a cure for unemployment.

There is a distinction, not always easy to make in practice, between economic problems that are universal and those that are linked to culture or to economic institutions. That men must eat and will "soak the rich" and overthrow governments before they will starve is close to a universal proposition. But that men prefer economic power to honor, that the equalization of marginal revenue and marginal cost is the mainspring of human action, or that labor seeks the best market in the same way that scrap iron or General Motors common stock does, are propositions that may apply in some, but not in all, situations.

Coriolanus opens with a scene suggestive of Paris before the fall of the Bastille, or of England in the days when the Anti-Corn Law League was a political power: the hungry masses aroused by the cry that the food shortage is due to the selfishness of the rich. A Roman citizen harangues the crowd with the rhetorical question:' "You are all resolved rather to die than to famish?" and turns them against Coriolanus with the cry: "Let us kill him, and we'll have corn at our own price What authority surfeits on would relieve us: the gods know I speak this in hunger for bread, not in thirst for revenge."

This is suggestive, if the threats of revolution are removed, of the optimistic approach of Adam Smith to economics: with wise policy there is sufficient for all willing to work. The reply of Menenius Agrippa, however, is in the fatalistic Malthusian tradition in explaining the food shortage:

I tell you, friends, most charitable care Have the patricians of you. For the dearth, The gods, not the patricians, make it, and Your knees to them, not arms, must help. Alack, You are transported by calamity Thither where more attends you, and you slander The helms 0' the state, who care for you like fathers, When you curse them as enemies.

Shakespeare, however, does not introduce any Roman prototype of John Stuart Mill to offer a solution for the natural laws versus human short-

comings explanation of economic distress, and the economic basis of the conflict between the people and the Roman leaders fades into the background. As Shakespeare pictures it, after the opening scene, the people's opposition to Coriolanus is not that he has impoverished them for the benefit of the privileged rich, but simply that he is power hungry and has a contempt for the people. And we would give a tortured interpretation to Coriolanus' actions if we tried to explain them on economic grounds: he loved power, but there is little suggestion that he craved material possessions or the control of the economic resources of Rome. His fellow general, Cominius, says of him:

Our spoils he kick'd at.

And look'd upon things precious, as they were

The common muck of the world: he covets less

Than misery itself would give; rewards His deeds with doing them, and is content

To spend the time to end it.

The words of Menenius Agrippa seem a fair judgment on the nature of Coriolanus' ambitions: "He wants nothing of a god but eternity and a heaven to throne in."

When we shift from individual clashes to the struggles of nations, the same picture emerges: the economic does not stand out as a cause of war. Even an economist who minimizes the economic interpretation of war might have expected some references to trade routes, fertile fields, or rich mines, as contributing to the conflicts between the Romans and the Volscians. But as far as Shakespeare is concerned these wars were as devoid of economic motives as the fisticuffs of a couple of. tough fifth graders who revel in trading insults and bloody noses, and who look forward with anticipation to the next encounter.

There is virtually nothing in the play that throws light on the economic life of the time. Coriolanus has no discussions with overtones of economic philosophy, such as the reflections of the King and the Earl of Gloucester in King Lear on the contrasts of wealth and poverty, or the partly satirical speech of Gonzalo in The Tempest on the ideal commonwealth where men live without working and property is divided equally: Once the grain shortage has been used in the opening scene to launch the plebeians' attack on Coriolanus, the picture of Rome, except for some passing comments on grain in Act III, is a city in which men orate, intrigue and fight, but give no thought to operating a functioning economy. Someone in the background must have supplied the food, clothing and shelter NORTHWESTERN TRI-QUARTERLY

for the Romans, but Shakespeare shows no more interest in discussing that than political reporters, telling of a dinner of Congressional leaders, would have in explaining the processes by which the room was heated, the food prepared, or the dishes washed. Except for a reference in Act IV, Scene I, to "our tradesmen singing in their shops," Shakespeare pictures no one in the Rome of Coriolanus as engaged in any economic activity. For an evaluation of Shakespeare's picture of the motivations of Roman life in the days of Coriolanus, the economist must turn over the major responsibility to the political scientist and the psychologist.

Coriolanus: An Exercise in Psychoanalysis - Rohert I. Watson

o mother, mother!

What have you 'done? Behold, the heavens do ope, The gods look down, and this unnatural scene They laugh at. 0 my mother, mother! O!

You have won a happy victory to Rome; But for your son - believe it, 0 believe it!Most dangerously you have with him prevailed, If not most mortal to him.

PSYCHOANALYSIS

WAS DEVELOPED by Sigmund Freud through his work with emotionally disturbed adults. Over the years of his clinical practice he and his followers developed a detailed schema for interpreting the dynamics of the individual personality. Because of the insight it gives, the use of the psychoanalytic interpretation of human nature has been extended to the entire gamut of human experience, including literature, religion, and art. As a means of literary criticism the rules of interpretive strategy that are applied to literature have been worked out in the clinic with the living tortured counterparts of less grand Coriolanuses and less noble Volumnias.

I shall offer a psychoanalytic interpretation of the personality of Coriolanus, and then examine the dynamic significance of the relation of the course of events in the life of Shakespeare, at the time he was writing Coriolanus, to the course of events he gives us in the play.

Psychoanalytic interpretation of Coriolanus' personal tragedy centers upon the characteristics of his personality as formed in his early relationships to his mother, and in the relation of these characteristics to his decisions from which the play takes its being.

Coriolanus had lost his father in infancy. His emotional needs in childhood must, perforce, have

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been met by his mother, Volumnia. No other identifications had been open to him in the little world that was his childhood home. Consequently, it becomes pertinent to inquire what sort of person she was. Some Shakespearean critics see in her the admirable, noble Roman matron of the days when the Republic was young. With this interpretation I must disagree. In her very first appearance (I, 3) she reproaches his wife, Virgilia, for lamenting the absence of Coriolanus; boasts of having sent him to war at what was an unusually early age (sixteen); and reacts approvingly, making an evident comparison with her son. to the story of her young grandson eventually killing the butterfly with his teeth, after teasing it by repeated capture and release. Here and in later scenes, she is shown as an extremely nonmaternal person, intent on molding her son into a preconceived image that serves to gratify her own masculine strivings. She is shown to have withheld praise and to have given him but little affection. She is fiercely non-feminine in all scenes except one-about which I shall say more later.

A conception of a dynamic relationship between frustration and aggression, although not unique to psychoanalysts, is accepted within their thinking. Childhood frustrations are interpreted as giving rise to aggressive behavior in adult life. A boy frustrated, as Coriolanus was, would be expected to be unconsciously very hostile to his mother, the source of his childhood frustrations. Despite this, he would also be expected to be very much dependent upon her. That Coriolanus is dependent upon her is common knowledge to the persons of the play. In the very first scene, one of the plebeians, who surely had no personal knowledge, says of Coriolanus that he pays himself for his exploits by his pride, and that he has done what he did "to please his mother."

What sort of man emerged from this boyhood? Through the course of the play he is shown repeatedly to be physically courageous, outspoken, and proud. In fact, these characteristics are so obvious that they do not need documentation. Their very obviousness suggests a certain exaggeration about each of these traits. His bravery is rashness, his pride is arrogance, and his outspokenness is rudeness. There is something driving and rigid about these salient characteristics.

Psychoanalytically speaking, this particular constellation of traits and their exaggeration would lead to the interpretation that Coriolanus is what is called a "phallic" character, a form of immature adult personality. The causative factors for a phallic character are to be sought in the events occurring in the stage of development extending

from 3 to 6 years of age. Normally, during these years there is a working out and dissolution of the problem of the Oedipus complex, and its replacement by sublimated affection for the parents. Difficulty of resolving the Oedipus complex would be expected from his childhood situation. Lacking a father, Coriolanus identified himself with the masculine characteristics of Volumnia, at the same time never resolving his Oedipal longings for the mother. In this perspective, his arrogant pride could be seen as his main line of defense against passive yearnings and unresolved Oedipal desires. That he did have these longings for passivity can be shown by other considerations.

Psychoanalytically speaking, it has been found that one characteristic form of defense of the ego of the phallic character is the attribution to other persons of his own strong unconscious characteristics. What are the characteristics that Coriolanus projects upon the plebeians? They are seen as cowardly, parasitic, covetous, and pleasure-loving. He also sees them as "foes to nobleness." Surely, he consciously believes that he shows the opposite of these qualities. It is plausible, therefore, to conclude that the mob represents a personification of the unacceptable impulses in his own personality. These unconscious drives to projection are so powerful in Coriolanus that he has to struggle to behave in a fashion the very opposite of the traits which, though well-. ing up within him, must at all costs be hidden. He must behave rigidly to protect himself. Even a small concession to these unconscious characteristics might be catastrophic in character. For example, Coriolanus cannot even behave non-arrogantly enough to follow the then common practice of showing his wounds in the market place or to show civility, let alone humbleness, at his trial. He cannot modify his behavior flexibly. He cannot change a little, he must stay as he is, or change a lot.

It is plausible to infer that in Act II and in Act III, particularly in the crucial third scene of the latter, there is an unconscious interpretation of Rome as a mother figure. Heretofore, Coriolanus has wanted nothing from Rome except to defend and to serve her. Now he is asking for acceptance of himself as consul. In effect, he is asking that he be seen as a father figure. Upon his being accused of being a traitor the unconscious significance would be that Rome is saying that his acts have been entirely selfish and that he really wanted exclusive possession of the mother. He has set aside for the first time his

major defense, his arrogant pride, but still he is repulsed.

We now come to the mystery of the play. Why did he spare Rome? In broad outline and at a slightly superficial level, one can say it is because his mother asked him to! Surely, we must look deeper than this. We find the solution in how Volumnia asked him to spare Rome.

Once, and only once, is Volumnia a woman. This is in the pivotal scene in which Coriolanus is before Rome. When she falls on her knees and begs Coriolanus to spare Rome he finds that his resolve to destroy the city disappears. His unconscious hostility toward her, as well as some of his conscious hostility toward mother Rome, is dissolved, at least partially in what he himself calls "this unnatural scene." When his mother abandons her masculine behavior for the first and only time, he spares Rome. In keeping with his "brittle" personality that must break but not bend, he not only spares Rome, he exacts no retribution whatsoever, merely marching his army back to the camp of Aufidius.

There a situation of bitter irony awaits him. In the last scene of the play, before Coriolanus is assassinated, Aufidius echoes the charge made by the citizen of the first scene, that he did what he did for his mother. He charges Coriolanus with being a boy. Clinically, when an individual responds with greater violence than the situation seems to call for, one suspects that something of considerable emotional significance has been touched upon. Coriolanus is stimulated to eloquent fury by the charge of being "a boy," thrice repeating the word, and also linking it with a reference to his mother as a nurse. He is accused of being a boy in connection with his one act which showed a dawning emotional maturity.

Psychological conjectures may be hazarded concerning the relationship between the experiences of Shakespeare, the author, and their projection in Coriolanus, the play. If all writing is a great confession, then Coriolanus may be a particularly important fragment. *

There are certain facts in the life of Shakespeare that must first be mentioned. Let us make the not unreasonable assumption that Coriolanus was written late in 1608 or early in 1609 while Shakespeare was still living in London. His mother had died September 9, 1608. During this period, without his permission, the Sonnets were

Holfling, C. K., An interpretation of Shakespeare's Coriolanus. Amer. Imago, 1957, 14, 407-435.

published. Shortly after writing CorioLanus, he retired to Stratford where he resumed living with his wife and wrote certain other plays. How can these experiences be related to the events depicted in Coriolanus?

At the very least, a series of parallels may be indicated. Coriolanus abandons Rome; Shakespeare leaves London. Coriolanus is separated from his mother by his death; Shakespeare is separated from his mother by her death. Coriolanus draws closer to his wife during the play; Shakespeare resumes living with his wife after writing the play. The departure of Coriolanus from Rome is preceded by a very personal scene brought about without his volition; the departure of Shakespeare from London is preceded by a personal revelation, the publication of the Sonnets very probably without his permission. The relations just sketched show a certain inner coherence which lends plausibility to the autobiographical character of the play, but this pattern does not constitute proof.

In the same vein and with the same caution one can say that, following the death of his mother, Shakespeare was able to write a searching study of the mother-son relationship which delineated the effects of a mother fixation on the son, and revealed the beginnings of resolution of the resultant conflicts. Thereafter Shakespeare returned to Stratford to write, with a new serenity, the romantic comedies, Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale, and that happiest of his mature accomplishments, The Tempest.

Coriolanus as a Tragic HeroMoody E. Prior

CORIOLANUS is a less appealing and sympathetic figure than most of Shakespeare's tragic heroes. Many of his actions in the play arise from his fierce hostility to the weaknesses of common men and from his attachment to and dependence upon his mother. The first of these makes him something less than amiable; the second detracts from the sense of independence and stature which we associate with the protagonists in the tragic tradition. There are, to be sure, marks of greatness about him, for he is a valiant soldier who has done his country extraordinary service. But his bravery is sometimes quixotic and he commands his men by goading and humiliating them. Cominius, his general, is made to appear more judicious as a warrior and more humane as a leader.

Coriolanus' arrogant sense of superiority over ordinary men drives him to exacerbate to a dangerous pitch the political tensions between the patricians and the tribunes, who represent the plebeians, and it is the force which precipitates the events which bring about his exile from Rome and ultimately his death. It is a kind of pride which separates Coriolanus from most men and almost from humanity itself. There is some truth in the accusation of the tribunes:

You speak 0' th' people

As if you were a god to punish, not A man of their infirmity.

The only thing which makes his pride admirable is Coriolanus' passionate desire to excel, to be worthy of the reputation of being Rome's chief soldier and defender. And, for better or worse, even this fierce striving for excellence has been inspired by his mother. It is conceivable at the outset that Coriolanus might have continued to survive as he was, occasionally offending the populace, sometimes embarrassing his patrician friends, subordinating his independence to the egotism of his mother, but great enough in his own way, and excelling all others in war, and thus gaining a grudging admiration even from those he hates. At a certain point, however, Coriolanus takes a step which creates circumstances he cannot control, and as a consequence his chief characteristics are engaged in their most destructive form. He agrees to accept the honor of being made a consul, one of the conditions of which is that he must submit to an ancient custom by showing to the citizens of Rome the wounds he has received in his country's wars and asking for their voices. It is not his pride, however, which prompts him to seek this office but his mother's entreaties and commands. These 'he cannot resist, but though he consents he does so with reluctance, knowing that he is about to perform an act which violates his integrity. And so it is an act which he can perform only badly, and in consenting to perform it he enters upon the path that leads to his destruction. In the encounter during which he stands for office, the plebeians come off better than he; when he asks insolently what the price is for the consulship they reply, "The price is to ask it kindly." But while the citizens may be willing to overlook his offensive manner in order that his merits might be rewarded, the tribunes, who are politicians, are not, and they foment a serious political crisis. Coriolanus consents under pressure to appease the mob, though again only because of an appeal from his mother. Now, how-

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ever, he is genumely bewildered: how can his mother counsel him to dissemble, to go counter to the hatred of lowness and to the pride in patrician virtues which she has taught him? Even more clearly than in the first instance, he knows that he will be acting without honor because he will be violating his nature. "Possess me," he cries, "some harlot's spirit."

Such a denial of one's essential character in an individual with great powers and strong principles is potentially tragic. Either one's characteristic and habitual virtues will be constrained, or they will manifest themselves in perverse and unfamiliar forms. Being what he is, Coriolanus is not fit to undertake his assigned role. To meet the new situation with success, he needed humility, or commonsense, or the hypocrisy of the unscrupulous politician. Possessing none of these, he is easily driven by the tribunes to a monumental rage which provides proof for their accusations and brings about his exile. He now allies himself with Aufidius, the leader of the enemy of Rome, and marches on to destroy his native city. Only an appeal from his mother saves Rome. Once more he accedes to her wishes, but he proclaims as he does so that this time her influence is "most mortal" to him.

In this final capitulation to his mother Coriolanus appears most like other mortal men. He is deeply touched by the appearance of his wife, his child, and his mother, and by the pleas of Volumnia to save his homeland from destruction. There is no indication, however, that his understanding has been enlarged by this experience, or his humanity. Nowhere does Volumnia speak with such honesty and wisdom as in her reproach:

Think'st thou it honourable for a noble man

Still to remember wrongs?

He seems to be swayed, however, not by her words but by her old authority over him, obeying once more the demands of the person whose ideals and hopes for him had formed his character and whose wishes had shaped his destiny.

There is a curious irony about some of the

concluding episodes which accentuates the limitations of Coriolanus' vision. The exalted virtues to which he has devoted his life lead him to make peace with his bitter enemies and to seek the destruction of his city, his friends, and his family. When he is exiled he shouts, "I banish you There is a world elsewhere." But there is no world without a changeable populace, as he discovers in Corioli. The supreme irony is that the man who determines upon his death and brings it about is the one man he admired above all others and with whom alone he would admit comparison with himself. Coriolanus never appears to become really aware of any of this, and in that fact may be found the secret of his puzzling narrowness as a tragic hero. Like the other tragic heroes of Shakespeare, Coriolanus possesses powers and qualities which set him apart from ordinary men, and like them he enters upon a course of action which involves him in circumstances he cannot meet with success and which leads to disaster. But in one significant respect he is unlike them. The other protagonists of Shakespeare's major tragedies all reach a moment of self awareness, they attempt to formulate for themselves the meaning of their destiny, and their final actions seem colored by a realization of all that has gone before. Coriolanus never reaches such a high point of self-knowledge or humanity. The play, Coriolanus, is not for this reason to be regarded as defective or deficient, for in its own fashion it is brilliant and wholly satisfactory. Shakespeare never bound himself to anyone formula, and he realized the possibilities of his art in a great variety of forms. It is nevertheless one way of defining the special properties of this particular play to note that its principal character cannot be placed on a level of complete equality alongside those magnificent creations of Shakespeare's mature genius whose failures in a practical sense inspire awe and respect, who in their progress from well-being to misfortune enlarge our apprehension of the human condition, and who in meeting disaster add a cubit to their stature.

Barbara 1 Fox

Barbara Joan Fox is a junior in the College of Liberal Arts. Her home is in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she was born and received her early schooling. She lives at Hobart House, is a member of Lorelei, and is a major in English Composition.

THE SUM

HE DIDN'T LIKE the way she had said that. "Robert!" Loud so the whole class could hear. They'd all turned their heads and looked at him, and he felt indecent as if he'd forgotten to zip up his fly when he came back from the lavatory. His hands were sweating. She'd caught him at something and he was ashamed. He didn't know what it was yet but there were so many things you could be ashamed of. He stole a quick glance downward.

"You've got to pay attention to your work." So that was Why. It wasn't as bad as he'd thought, but he still felt as if he'd been doing something evil. He bent his head over the smudged-up paper and he felt thirty pairs of eyes boring into him from every corner of the room. Darn her! Why did she have to make everybody look at him? Why couldn't she just leave him alone? Then no one would notice him sitting in the fourth seat in the third row.

He stared down at the first group of black numbers he had written at the top of the page and tried to think them in his mind. 5 and 2 made 7 and 1 was 8. Without looking up he could tell she was standing behind him, sucking absently on one earpiece of the black-rimmed glasses she held in her hand. She was always watching him. When she said something to him she'd glare at him with those black eyes and he would see all the little dark hairs on her upper lip and then he would want to look down at his shoes. But he couldn't because she would be glaring at him so hard that he was unable to turn his eyes away. He'd forgotten where he was and had to start over again. 5 and 2 were 7 he would have to go through five numbers before he would get to the bottom of the column. There were five figures across and five figures down. He decided to stop and count how many problems there were. It would be better if he knew how many problems he had to do.

Spring, 1960

He heard her breathing behind him and he knew her big breasts were going in and out. She had a double chin. At least that's what his father called it because his grandmother had a chin like that too. He felt the bottom of his own face. He only had one chin.

The numbers on the page were thick and black, because that was the way those pencils wrote. She always told him his paper was messy. He didn't think it was messy at all except maybe some of the numbers were a bit crooked or too big. That was the way those pencils wrote. He'd better get to work or soon she would tell the class to stop and trade their papers and he wouldn't be ready.

He always had to exchange papers with the girl sitting next to him, who picked her scabs all the time. He didn't like girls who picked their scabs. The teacher would read the answers and they would mark each other's papers and then they would hand them in. His always had big fat x's all over it. After that she would put problems on the board and call on kids for the answers, and he would wait and wait and wait and finally the bell would ring and he could go to the cloak room and get his coat.

5 and 2 made 7 and 1 was 8 plus 2 was 10 He could hear the cars going back and forth in the street below the window. When they went to the cloak room everyone would push and the coats would get knocked off the hooks but he would find his under the pile on the floor and then he could go home. He wondered why they called it a "cloke room." He wasn't too sure what "cloke" meant.

5 and 2 were 7 How many times had he said that? Sometimes if he didn't get finished she made him stay after class and do the rest. He wanted to know how everyone else got done so fast. Like Jimmy for instance. How did Jimmy get done so fast? He looked at Jimmy's dark head bent over his wooden desk. Jimmy was always

captain of the softball team. Maybe they would let Robert play today. They played in that empty side street next to his house every day, but they didn't like him to play because he always missed the ball when it came to him. They didn't know it but really he would be the best player of them all as soon as they would give him a chance. Some day he would be so good that he would play on the top team in the country and he wouldn't even look at them when they came and asked him to be their pitcher. When he batted he would always make home runs. He could hear everyone cheering for him as he ran around the bases.

5 and 2 were 7 and 1 was 8 and 2 made 10 plus 9 made 19. He wrote down the 9 below the line at the bottom and said in his mind "carry 1." If thev didn't Jet him play he would go hunting in his jungle. Actually it wasn't a jungle; it was only where they hadn't built anything yet and there were a whole bunch of skinny trees. But if you stood right in the middle of it you could hardly see the houses all around and then you could pretend you were a great hero on a safari and there were tigers in the bushes.

Skippy would go with him too and be his elephant. Then when he was tired of slaying all those tigers barehanded, and it was almost time for his mother to call him home to dinner, he would sit on the curb and make Skippy lie down next to him. When he sat like that with that big head in his lap, he could feel the warm spot on his leg where Skippy always stuck his paw. Skippy was his secret agent who understood everything, and some day they were going to track down criminals together.

She was bending over to say something to him. He didn't like her hot wet breath on the back of his neck. "Robert, stop daydreaming." "Oh.

She straightened up and strolled down the aisle, gazing down on the head of each student in turn. He wondered if she had a dog. No, of course not.

He'd forgotten what he was supposed to carry. He stared at the 9 at the bottom of the column.

Had it been 29 or 19 or 9? He'd have to add it again to find out. This time it came out to 18. It wasn't even supposed to be a 9. He'd made a mistake. He picked up the fat rubber eraser on his desk and tried to erase the 9. When he used that eraser he always ended up with a black smear. Well, it would have to do. He wrote an 8 as dark as he could in the middle of the smear and put a little 1 at the top of the next column so he would remember to carry it. No, that was wrong. Maybe it wasn't 18. Maybe he had been right in the first place. 5 and 2 were 7 and 1 was 8 and 2 were 10 and 9 was 19. He sighed in exasperation. He'd have to erase it again.

It seemed like he had been sitting there forever waiting for that class to end. She had told them to exchange papers to be checked before he had even finished the first problem, and the girl who picked her scabs had smirked because that meant she could mark big x's all over the page. They had done problems from the board and he had kept hoping she wouldn't call on him so he wouldn't have to hear his voice announcing to the class, "I haven't got it figured out yet." But that had happened too. Now she was talking to him once more and everyone was staring at him again. He wished he could sink down into the wood of his chair and disappear. "Robert, 1 want you to stay after class and finish your addition."

Angry tears stung the corners of his eyes and he had that familiar pinched feeling at the top of his nose. When everyone got up to get their coats he would have to stay in his seat. They would empty out of the room, looking back over their shoulders at him and later he would still be there with his addition, hearing them laugh and yell at each other outside. The four walls would close him in with the sound of her heavy breathing, which would come to him from the front of the room as he struggled to find the right answers among the crooked black numbers. And back home Skippy would wander through the jungle, and sniff aimlessly at rusty tin cans, wondering where he was.

Harold M Crutsmacher; IT.

Harold M. Grutzmaeher, Jr. is presently teaching at Carthage College and completing the requirements for his Ph.D. at Northwestern. He was graduated from Beloit in 1952, received his M.A. at Northwestern in 1953, taught as assistant in the English Department, and subsequently served for two years in the U.S. Army.

POEMS

The Gallery

They sat, the bright room quiet, Unconcerned with persons, occupied With beauty on the walls, And they remained, stern as the room, Staring at a canvas with shaded eyes.

"Seurat, what would you have?

I perceive you, your world worth having; I know you, not in words, And for her possibility there must be That same perception without words.

Is that too much, painter Jacques Of the frozen line and dots?

If she does not perceive, if she attempts Some plague of words, she could not hold That fragment that I have to give. If somehow you could answer. Some quiet confessional perhaps-?"

"God, if he only knows What this compound of paint And genius tells me and the world!

Annual Writing Award

If he speaks it is gone, But shall I ever know?"

After a long time They left through the shadows Without a look or word.

Variations on a Theme 01 Stevens

Long-Tailed Ponies Go Nosing The Highlands. There is again a tinkling of small bells Among hillsides, and the sky is deep.

Ponies crop the grass at dusk, precisely Lipping grasses seen greener in the sun, Before sleep and tomorrow's dainty steps.

Life is of ponies, if defined, and deep Sky away from water. What if the bird Has many ways of looking at ponies?

Pfaugh, writing of Life when there are ponies Riding themselves to pasture! The green spears And pristine bells are exquisite and new.

The editors of THE TRI-QUARTERLY are pleased to announce the winners of their first annual writing award. Kristin Knabe won the first prize of $50.00 for her story in the Fall issue, "The Beggar." The winner of the second prize, of $25.00, is C. Dennis Wunsch, with his story in this issue, "The End of the Rainbow."

The co-sponsors of this award are Sigma Delta Chi and Theta Sigma Phi, professional journalism iraternuu and sorority respectively. We wish to thank these two organizations for their generosity in promoting creative writing at Northwestern.

Judging is done by the student editors of THE TRI-QUARTERLY from among the undergraduate pieces that have appeared in the three issues each academic yoear. Graduating seniors may receive the award the following year if the story or poem was written bejore time of graduation, as was the case with Kristin Knabe. We hope that this award encourages more undergraduates to contribute to THE TRI-QUARTERLY next year. The prize may be awarded for fiction, poetry, or non-fiction.

Spring, 1960

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